The European Research Council awarded a €2.5 million grant to a multinational team that will use artificial intelligence, chemical analysis, and handwriting studies to determine where the Dead Sea Scrolls were produced. The five-year project, announced by the Israel Antiquities Authority in June, aims to solve a mystery that has persisted since the scrolls were first discovered in 1946: were they written at the Qumran settlement itself, or brought from Jerusalem and other locations?
The team, led by Professor Mladen Popović of the University of Groningen, includes historians, archaeologists, material scientists, chemists, and AI specialists. They will examine roughly 250 samples of parchment, papyrus, and ink. For the first time, papyri from Egypt will be compared directly with samples from Qumran and other Judean Desert sites.
"This is the largest research project to date to use artificial intelligence to investigate the cultural context of the Dead Sea Scrolls," Popović said.
The AI analysis focuses on identifying chemical patterns that human researchers might miss. The project will also apply advances in paleography - the study of ancient handwriting - and codicology, the study of book structures.
"We are now able to address questions that were previously beyond our reach: who copied these manuscripts, where they were produced, how knowledge circulated, and the role these texts played within the society of their time," Popović said.
Israel Antiquities Authority researcher Dr. Ilit Cohen-Ofri told The Media Line that the work involves at least six researchers from Sweden, Italy, and the Netherlands. She said that many scholars had envisioned Qumran as a medieval-style monastery where scribes worked, but evidence remains thin - researchers found only one or two inkwells at the site, not enough to support the theory of a large scriptorium.
"Think of people who might have fled from the Romans, and they fled from Jerusalem to the caves, and they took their precious possessions, including the scrolls, with them," Cohen-Ofri suggested.
Popović said the manuscripts offer "an extraordinary window into the intellectual world of ancient Judea."
The Israel Antiquities Authority called the Dead Sea Scrolls one of the 20th century's most significant archaeological finds. They contain some of the earliest-known manuscripts of several books of the Bible.
Testing a separate Qumran mystery: the incense dust
A separate effort revisits another unresolved claim from the same region. In 1992, excavator Vendyl Jones found hundreds of kilograms of reddish-brown organic material sealed in a cave south of Qumran. Volunteers who handled it reported that the scent stayed on their clothing for days. Jones believed the substance could be *ketoret* - the sacred Temple incense that was burned twice daily in Jerusalem.
Jones held a press conference before formally reporting the discovery to religious authorities, and the dust was transferred to private ownership. It never underwent complete scientific testing.
Project Qumran, a Jean-based nonprofit, released a paper in July reviewing the find and detailing plans for new testing. Researcher M. Rhonda Attar told The Media Line that scientists will perform radiocarbon dating, elemental analysis, organic carbon testing, and phytochemical studies. The goal is to compare those results with ancient descriptions of the Temple incense to determine whether the dust matches the recipe - and perhaps reverse-engineer the exact ingredients.
Two preliminary tests conducted at the time produced promising results. Dr. Marvin Antelman at the Weizmann Institute detected eight of the 11 principal ingredients listed in the Talmud, including saffron, cinnamon, costen frankincense, and myrrh. Dr. Terry Hutter of Hutchinson, Kansas, also examined the dust and reported that the material was consistent with the correct proportions of ingredients.
Much of the original cache disappeared after Jones' death. Following the October 7, 2023, attack, what is believed to be additional samples was donated to Project Qumran by Jones's widow. The recipe for the Temple incense has been lost since the Second Temple was destroyed in 70 BCE.
Attar said determining whether this substance could *ketoret* would shed light on daily life at Qumran and help researchers identify ingredients that have been lost for 2,000 years. "Science has come into the modern era," she said. "We should really be able to figure out what this is."
How the AI research fits into broader science and research
Both projects follow similar methods: using advanced analytical tools to resolve debates that have lingered for decades because the evidence was too subtle or degraded for traditional archaeological methods. The scrolls work combines chemistry, AI pattern recognition, and historical studies to tackle questions of origin and production. Research teams applying AI to forensic analysis of ancient materials are gaining traction across multiple disciplines.
The Qumran dust project follows the same logic - test what can be tested now, rather than accept that the answers are lost.
Why this matters for science and research professionals
For researchers in archaeology, material science, and computational chemistry, these projects demonstrate how AI and machine learning are moving beyond text analysis into forensic material analysis. The chemical comparison of ancient organic remains against historical recipes represents a workflow that will become more common as analytical equipment improves and as AI tools become better at identifying subtle patterns in complex chemical data. The two projects also illustrate how multidisciplinary teams - historians next to chemists next to data scientists - can produce testable hypotheses about questions that were considered insoluble even a decade ago. For those working in AI for Science & Research, these are model cases for how to design experiments that combine digital analysis with physical evidence to answer long-standing questions.
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