Who wrote the Dead Sea Scrolls? Digital handwriting analysis and artificial intelligence offer new clues

One day during the second century BC, a scribe dipped a pen in ink and started writing pages and pages of Hebrew on leather parchment.

The manuscript was to become one of the famous Dead Sea Scrolls.

But about halfway through their job, the scribe stopped writing, and the rest of the 7-metre-long manuscript was written by someone else.

Centuries later in 1947, a young Bedouin shepherd stumbled upon the scroll, which had been wrapped in linen and hidden in a jar, as part of a legendary find in the Qumran Caves west of Jerusalem.

As experts examined what became known as the Great Scroll of Isaiah, they noted the handwriting appeared to be uniform throughout, and most assumed it had been scribed by one person.

But the latest analysis using…