Technology Archives - Page 27 of 33

Five Dead Sea Scrolls Online in High Resolution

Google and the Israel Museum are beginning to fulfill their promise to make the Dead Sea Scrolls available online. The first installment includes five scrolls:

Great Isaiah Scroll
Community Rule Scroll
Commentary on Habakkuk Scroll
Temple Scroll
War Scroll

The Jerusalem Post explains that readers can search the Isaiah Scroll in English:

The Isaiah Scroll was also translated line by line, allowing viewers to search in regular search engines in English for specific phrases or verses in the scrolls. A verse-by-verse Chinese translation will be finished shortly, as Bible scholarship is extremely popular in China, said Israel museum officials.

The article also describes the digitization process:

Ardon Bar Hama, a freelance photographer and one of the world’s premier experts in photographing ancient texts for online viewing, used a $50,000 camera that exposed the scrolls to the light for 1/4,000th of a second. Ben Hama’s camera shoots at a resolution of 1,200 megapixels, in comparison, a good personal camera shoots at about 12 megapixels.
Google utilizes cloud computing to store to the giant images, allowing people to browse the scrolls from their cell phones. Users will also be able to highlight their favorite verses and post them to their Twitter or Facebook pages, or to comment on verses through the site in an international dialogue.

The full article is here or you may go directly to the scrolls at the Israel Museum website. Prepare to be impressed.

Tagged Dead Sea, Technology

Wednesday Roundup

A 600-lb metal anchor from the Byzantine period has been discovered off the coast south of Tel Aviv. The find led investigators to two others in the area. Photos are available from the IAA in a zip file. The Sound the Shofar exhibition opened last week in Jerusalem with more than 140 of the horns on display at the Bible Lands Museum. The story includes a two-minute video. The Jerusalem Post has more information about Google Street View in Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, and Haifa. Wayne Stiles takes readers on a visit to Shiloh, the longtime home of the tabernacle. The Archaeology of Libya is discussed in this week’s radio program at the Book and the Spade. (Here’s the direct link to the mp3 file). ATS Pro Terra Sancta has plans to renovate “the Holy Place of Sebastia.” I certainly support improving the conditions at the ancient city of Samaria, though it strikes me as odd to consider as holy the place where Ahab built a temple for Baal worship and Herod built another for the worship of the Roman emperor. An inscription in Aramaic and Greek on a stone lintel has been discovered in the area of ancient Sepphoris. The report is in Hebrew and includes a photograph. A Roman-era style bathhouse was constructed in the middle of a Early Islamic period fortress, say archaeologists excavating at Yavneh-Yam on Israel’s coast. HT: Joseph Lauer, Jack Sasson Yavneh-Yam

Tagged Discoveries, Galilee, Jerusalem, Museums, Samaria, Technology, Weekend Roundup

Kinect Game System To Be Used in Jordan Excavation

From Popular Science:

Archaeological digs are a painstaking process even after the earth has been excavated — artifacts must be carefully catalogued so researchers know exactly where they were found, which tells information about their past. On an upcoming dig in Jordan, a modified Kinect could serve as a 3-D scanner, making this process simpler — and decidedly more high-tech.
Researchers hope students traveling to an archaeological dig in Jordan will use a hacked Microsoft Kinect as a mobile scanning system, making 3-D models of ancient sites that can then be visited in a virtual-reality environment.
[…]
The modified ArKinect — archaeology and Kinect — would scan an entire dig site, and the data would be used to reconstruct the site in 3-D. Calit2 has an immersive VR system called StarCAVE, a 360-degree, 16-panel setup, which allows researchers to interact with virtual objects. A realistic 3-D portrayal of ancient cookware, for instance, would be a lot more valuable than a 2-D photograph, because it would show more detail and craftsmanship and even help researchers understand how an artifact was used.

The full story is here.

HT: Charles Savelle

Tagged Excavations, Technology

Weekend Roundup #2

X-ray analysis may help scholars to determine where the Dead Sea Scrolls were written.

Christopher Rollston has posted his detailed observations about the Mariam-Yeshua-Caiaphas ossuary. Among other things, he suggests that Khirbet Qeiyafa in the Shephelah preserves the name
of Caiaphas.

Israel has 6,000 miles of trails. A new article at Israel’s MFA describes some of Israel’s favorite hikes, including the Israel Trail, the Burma Road, Nahal Ammud, Nahal Darga, Nahal Yehudiya,
Wadi Qilt, and Mount Zephahot. Some courageous tour guide should offer a two-week tour of these fabulous trails.

The Jewish Magazine has a post about Khirbet Karta, the ruins of a Crusader castle near Atlit.

The Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago is offering “Dig Into History: An Archaeology
Experience Camp for Adults” in July and August.

Israel’s History – a Picture a Day: This new blog presents images taken in the late 1800s or early 1900s, primarily from the collections of the Library of Congress. (Some of these photographs will be familiar to users of the American Colony and Eric Matson Collection.)

Jerusalem Post: “A leader of Egypt’s most influential secular party…said American soldiers ‘with double Israeli nationality and Jewish religion’ stole Jewish antiquities from the Babylonian exile period and reburied them in Jerusalem to cement their historical claim on the city.” At least he’s not denying that Jewish antiquities have been discovered in Jerusalem.

HT: Joseph Lauer

Tagged Jerusalem, Technology, Tourism, Weekend Roundup

Weekend Roundup

Gordon Franz has updated his article about Simcha’s nails, including statements from several authorities that deny that the nails came from the tomb of Caiaphas.

The excavators of Tel Burna have posted the report on the first archaeological season.

James Hoffmeier is lecturing on “The Exodus from Egypt in Light of Recent Archaeological and Geological Work in North Sinai” in Houston on May 21.

The Global Heritage Fund has created “its own spy agency, created to allow armchair archaeologists (as well as real ones), to watch for looting, disasters and other calamities at some of the most endangered sites of human history.”

This July, Thomas Davis will become Professor of Archaeology and Biblical Backgrounds at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Forth Worth, Texas. Davis is author of Shifting Sands: The Rise and Fall of Biblical Archaeology. One clear result of the fall of biblical archaeology is that professors now have significantly different titles.

If you believed the recent report about dishonesty by the author of Three Cups of Tea, perhaps you were unaware that it was the work of 60 Minutes. These are the same folks who brought us the report exposing the James Ossuary and the Jehoash Tablet as forgeries. The heart of their case was the on-screen confession of an Egyptian artisan. Yet Hershel Shanks has investigated and determined that it was all a lie. And 60 Minutes knew it all along.

Tagged Egypt, Pseudo-Archaeology, Shephelah, Technology, Weekend Roundup

The Colors of Ancient Marble Statues

A free exhibition at Stanford University reveals the bright colors that once covered the ancient sculptures of Greece and Rome. From the Stanford Report:

With the silent attentiveness of a physician, Ivy Nguyen passes her hands over the recumbent white lady in the darkened lab. She cradles a handheld black light in her fingers.
Under the Stanford sophomore’s skillful watch in the Cantor Arts Center lab, long-dead colors on marble come alive after two millennia.
The results of Nguyen’s painstaking efforts are on display in “True Colors: Rediscovering Pigments on Greco-Roman Marble Sculpture” at the Cantor. The exhibition runs until Aug. 7. Admission is free.
Though we still think of ancient Greece and Rome in terms of white marble sparkling under a hot Mediterranean sun, the new exhibition shows at least one Greco-Roman lady as she was meant to be seen – in Technicolor. Not everyone may take to Stanford’s painted lady, but first impressions can change. “It’s very different – some have called it kind of garish,” admitted sophomore Nguyen, but she confesses that she’s gotten used to it.
We’ve always known that ancient statues were painted: The Metropolitan Museum of Art has a vase, circa 360-350 B.C., depicting a man painting a statue of Herakles. The most important evidence is on the statues themselves – traces of paint that time did not wash from the creases and crevices in porous marble.

The full story includes a photo and a video.

HT: Joe Lauer

Tagged Greece, New Exhibits, Technology