AI Analysis Suggests Some Dead Sea Scrolls Are Older Than Previously Believed

Characterized by pale greening, a timeline of ancient handwritten manuscripts—like the scroll of death—is vital for reconstructing the progression of ideas. However, there is an almost complete absence of manuscripts with dates. To address this challenge, an international team of researchers developed an AI-driven date prediction model named Enoch, inspired by biblical figures.

While some ancient manuscripts include dates, facilitating precise dating by archaeologists, many do not provide this information.

Researchers can estimate the age of certain undated manuscripts by analyzing the evolution of handwriting styles, but this requires a sufficient number of manuscripts with known dates for creating an accurate timeline.

In the recent study, the University of Groningen and Dr. Mladen Popović assessed the historical periods of manuscripts from various locations in contemporary Israel and the West Bank through radiocarbon dating and utilized machine learning to explore the handwriting styles of each document.

By merging these two datasets, they developed the Enoch program, which objectively estimates the approximate age range by comparing handwriting styles from other manuscripts in the area.

To validate the program, ancient handwriting specialists reviewed age estimates for 135 Ennochs from the Dead Sea Scrolls.

Experts concluded that around 79% of the AI-generated estimates were credible, while the remaining 21% were considered too old, too young, or uncertain.

Enoch has already aided researchers in uncovering new insights about these ancient manuscripts.

For instance, both Enoch and radiocarbon dating techniques estimated an older age for more Dead Sea scrolls compared to traditional handwriting analyses.

“While additional data and further investigation could enhance our understanding of the timeline, our findings offer novel perspectives on the creation periods of these documents,” the researchers stated.

“The Enoch tool serves as a gateway to an ancient world, akin to a time machine, permitting the exploration of biblical handwritten texts.

“It is thrilling to establish significant steps in developing new tools that can tackle the dating challenges of the Dead Sea Scrolls and examine other partially dated manuscript collections from history.”

“This achievement would not have been feasible without collaboration across diverse scientific fields and genuine teamwork.”

A paper detailing this study was published in the journal PLOS 1.

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M. Popovich et al. 2025. Dating ancient manuscripts using radiocarbon and AI-based writing style analysis. PLOS 1 20 (6): E0323185; doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0323185