Ray-gun tech used on the DSS

X-RAY TECHNOLOGY is being used on the Dead Sea Scrolls:

This week, Berlin scientists are to brief scholars on 21st century methods of sorting the fragments, which contain Hebrew, Greek and Aramaic writing and are kept at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem.

The new methods, which include shining X-rays through the parchment and papyrus, are guaranteed not to damage them.

Re-analysis would not only help to resolve some fierce academic and religious disputes that have been based on differing readings of the texts, but also help reconstruct several more documents which had seemed lost for ever in the muddle of fragments.

The new methods were evolved by BAM, Germany's material-science laboratory in Berlin.

'We'll be able to say if any two fragments have identical material properties,' explained BAM spokeswoman Ulrike Rockland. 'If they do, they come from the same piece. No one could say that with certainty before.'

[...]

Rockland said the Berlin laboratory worked on a variety of the goatskin fragments to develop procedures to catalogue them.

These include examination with light, electron and environmental scanning electron microscopes and advanced technologies known as X-ray fluorescence spectroscopy and Raman spectroscopy.

The experts devised standard ways to trace how each piece of parchment was made and how it aged.

'Goatskin is an organic material. If two fragments have the same X-ray, Raman and infrared signature, they must belong together,' said Rockland.

The procedures can also identify different batches of handmade ink. The scientists manufactured their own iron-gall ink using ancient recipes to test what happens as it dries and eats its way into the parchment.

The sole disadvantage of the new tests is the high cost.

The Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation in Berlin paid for the initial, joint German-Israeli research project.

The results will be presented at a 'workshop' in Berlin Monday where scientists and humanities scholars will mingle to learn how they can help one another to take the research forward. Authors: Jean-Baptiste Piggin, Ulrike von Leszczynski

From Monsters and Critics. For some perhaps related ray-gun technology see here. (Sorry, I can't remember what the first, dead, link was about.) Also, this post on photographic techniques and manuscript digitization is probably related as well.