Digital Unwrapping

The presentation highlights ground-breaking research allowing modern scholars to access carbonized ancient texts unreadable up to now. Brent Seales developed a software program that digitally unwraps ancient scrolls that have burned to a crisp and are otherwise unreadable. His program successfully analyzed a CT-scan of a 2,000-year old scroll recovered from the 1970 excavation of a burned synagogue. When the scroll was finally readable, it turned out to be the biblical book of Leviticus.