PhD fellowship on DSS scribes

UNIVERSITY OF GRONINGEN: ERC PhD position Digital Palaeography and Dead Sea Scrolls Scribal Culture (216006).

Job description
This PhD subproject is embedded within a larger research programme titled The Hands that Wrote the Bible: Digital Palaeography and Scribal Culture of the Dead Sea Scrolls, funded by the European Research Council. The main objective of this interdisciplinary project is to shed new light on ancient Jewish scribal culture and the making of the Bible by investigating two aspects of the scrolls’ palaeography: the typological development of writing styles and writer identification. The combination of new C14 samples and the use of computational intelligence as quantitative methods in order to assess the development of handwriting styles and to identify individual scribes will be used to cluster manuscripts as products of scribal activity in order to profile scribal production and to determine a more precise location in time for their activity, focusing, from literary and cultural-historical perspectives, on the content and genres of the texts that scribes wrote and copied and on the scripts and languages that they used.
The goal of the PhD subproject is to identify one or more prolific scribes of the Qumran manuscripts, to date these scribes, and to analyse quantitatively and qualitatively the scribal activity of one or more specific Qumran scribes. This subproject will compare the traditional palaeographical identification of specific scribes with the digital palaeographic identification, and choose the most prolific scribe of manuscripts that are, on the basis of existing scholarship, classified as so-called ‘sectarian’. The PhD will correlate the manuscripts identified as copied by this scribe with two widely but not universally accepted hypotheses pertaining to sectarian manuscripts and literature.
The PhD will work together with a PhD at the Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Engineering Institute (ALICE), and with a postdoc and student assistants at the Qumran Institute of the faculty.

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