More Than One Scribe Wrote the Text of a Dead Sea Scroll, Handwriting Shows

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More than one scribe wrote the text of a Dead Sea Scroll, handwriting shows:

Most of the scribes who copied the text contained in the Dead Sea Scrolls were anonymous, as they neglected to sign their work. That has made it challenging for scholars to determine whether a given manuscript should be attributed to a single scribe or more than one, based on unique elements in their writing styles (a study called paleography). Now, a new handwriting analysis of the Great Isaiah Scroll, applying the tools of artificial intelligence, has revealed that the text was likely written by two scribes, mirroring one another's writing style, according to a new paper published in the journal PLOS ONE.

[...] Most scholars believed that the Isaiah Scroll was copied by a single scribe because of the seemingly uniform handwriting style. But others have suggested that it may be the work of two scribes writing in a similar style, each copying one of the scroll's two distinct halves. "They would try to find a 'smoking gun' in the handwriting, for example, a very specific trait in a letter that would identify a scribe," said co-author Mladen Popovi of the University of Groningen. Popovi is also director of the university's Qumran Institute, dedicated to the study of the Dead Sea Scrolls.

In other words, the traditional paleographic method is inherently subjective and based on a given scholar's experience. It's challenging in part because one scribe could have a fair amount of variability in their writing style, so how does one determine what is a natural variation or a subtle difference indicating a different hand? Further complicating matters, similar handwriting might be the result of two scribes sharing a common training, a sign the scribe was fatigued or injured, or a sign the scribe changed writing implements.

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