Lately, there’s been a push to digitize everything–old family movies, record collections. Our lives are fleeting and fast. We want to save our cherished memories, and somehow make them last forever.
So it shouldn’t be a great surprise that historians are also feeling the pinch.
The Dead Sea Scrolls are an amazing collection of almost perfectly-preserved documents dating back to around the time of Jesus. They contain everything from alternate renditions of canonical texts to lost treasure maps. The Israel Museum, where the scrolls are housed, partnered with Google to create a website that allows users to browse, search and translate the text of the Scrolls, and also to interact with the graphics of the Scrolls themselves, zooming in and flipping around. (You can visit the website here.) Even if you can’t read Hebrew, you may enjoy clicking your way through a 2000 year-old text that’s undeniably cool.
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