Posted by Anthony Martin
Mon, 24 Sep 2007 17:14:00 GMT
New x-ray techniques will be used on some of the Dead Sea Scrolls that are too fragile to unravel.
They will look at the texts using x-rays produced at the £360m ($722m US) Diamond Light Source in Didcot, Oxfordshire. The machine works by propelling electrons at great speeds around a giant tunnel. As they corner, they emit x-rays 100bn (100,000,000bm US) times brighter than a medical x-ray.
Researchers led by Tim Wess have developed computer software that can “unravel” x-ray images of rolled up parchment documents to reveal the writing, even if the parchment has text on either side, according to Guardian.
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Posted by Anthony Martin
Mon, 10 Sep 2007 19:22:00 GMT
Here’s another ancient find. Apparently archaeologists have discovered evidence of the ancient bee-keeping industry described in Exodus 3:8. It appears to date back as far as 3,000 years old. The find was uncovered in northern Israel and is believed to be the oldest intact hive ever found, as MSNBC reports.
Now they just need to uncover the ancient Israeli cow farms … ahh smell that dairy air.
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Posted by Anthony Martin
Thu, 06 Sep 2007 06:06:00 GMT
You never know what might turn up when you’re digging around the British Museum. July 2007, Professor Michael Jursa found a cuneiform receipt from a person named in Jeremiah 39, as the Telegraph reports:
Searching for Babylonian financial accounts among the cuneiform tablets, Prof Jursa suddenly came across a name he half remembered – Nabu-sharrussu-ukin, described there in a hand 2,500 years old, as “the chief eunuch” of Nebuchadnezzar II, king of Babylon.
Prof Jursa, an Assyriologist, checked the Old Testament and there in chapter 39 of the Book of Jeremiah, he found, spelled differently, the same name – Nebo-Sarsekim.
Nebo-Sarsekim, according to Jeremiah, was Nebuchadnezzar II’s “chief officer” and was with him at the siege of Jerusalem in 587 BC, when the Babylonians overran the city.
The small tablet, the size of “a packet of 10 cigarettes” according to Irving Finkel, a British Museum expert, is a bill of receipt acknowledging Nabu-sharrussu-ukin’s payment of 0.75 kg of gold to a temple in Babylon.
The tablet is dated to the 10th year of the reign of Nebuchadnezzar II, 595BC, 12 years before the siege of Jerusalem.
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