Researchers Launch AI Project to Trace Dead Sea Scrolls

The European Research Council awarded a €2.5 million Advanced Grant to Professor Mladen Popović of the University of Groningen for a five-year project that will use AI to analyze 250 samples of Dead Sea Scrolls, combining chemical assays, handwriting analysis, and codicology to trace scribes and scrolls.

Editorial analysis: For practitioners, this project illustrates how combining chemical assays, paleography, codicology, and AI can create multimodal provenance pipelines for cultural heritage datasets. According to The Jerusalem Post, the European Research Council awarded a €2.5 million Advanced Grant to Professor Mladen Popović of the University of Groningen for a five-year research project titled Tracing Scribes and Scrolls . JNS reports the project will analyze about 250 samples of parchment, papyrus, and ink from the Israel Antiquities Authority collection and will combine chemical signatures, handwriting paleographical analysis, codicology, and artificial intelligence. The Jerusalem Post and JNS state the project partners include the Israel Antiquities Authority and several European laboratories, and that the new effort builds on Popović's earlier ERC-funded project, The Hands That Wrote the Bible , which pioneered AI-based scribe identification.