The scroll, which now resembles a fist-sized glob of ash, was originally discovered in 1970 in Israel near the Dead Sea, in a damaged Holy Ark in an ancient Jewish synagogue. Until now it has been ...

Because the scroll was so delicate, archaeologists were too scared to analyze it. “Physical intervention was unthinkable,” the researchers wrote in a paper published this week in Science Advances.

They analysed a single Hebrew letter, aleph, which appears more than 5,000 times in the scroll. In a paper published by scholars Mladen Popovic, Maruf Dhali and Lambert Schomaker, external, they ...

According to the scroll, he even went so far as to criticize their “scant sense of rhythm.” The section also offers a revised timeline of Plato’s life by stating that the philosopher was ...