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Dead Sea Scroll fragments thought to be blank reveal text
- vosper 6y agoThe second paragraph of the press release reveals what the institution is actually excited about ;) > The discovery means that The University of Manchester is the only institution in the UK to possess authenticated textual fragments of the Dead Sea Scrolls.
- scrozier 6y agoExactly what jumped out at me. Glad to know I'm not the only cynic. :-)
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- hackissimo123 6y agoMy initial thought upon reading the title: 'what the hell is "blank reveal text"?'
- basch 6y agoI had the same trouble. It's a poorly written headline, the scrolls themselves did not perform the reveal.
- emmelaich 6y agoThe word 'reveal' is the current favourite of click-bait title writers.
- DC-3 6y agoIt's just bizarre. The scrolls didn't do any revealing! The people did!
- derefr 6y agoDid they? > reveal, v. ts., 1. make (previously unknown or secret information) known to others. If I turn on a flashlight in a dark room, I reveal the contents of the room; but the flashlight also reveals the contents of the room; and at the lowest level, the light from the flashlight reveals the contents of the room. One could go even deeper, and say that the objects "reveal themselves", as the pigments in the objects react to the light by transmitting information about the objects to my eyes (unlike stealth planes or dark matter, which do not reveal themselves in response to light.) A server can "reveal" information by transmitting it to you, in response to your request for it. A server reveals itself when it responds to a ping. A server that ignores pings and portscans is avoiding revealing itself. Basically, any entity in the causal chain for information being produced—even a non-agentive one—seems capable of "revealing" in English. (Perhaps you're thinking of "unveil"? That word implies that there's a thing external to the information—a veil/curtain—and requires an agentive entity to act upon it.)
- DC-3 6y agoMy intuition for the verb 'reveal' is that the subject need be in some way active in the object being de-obscured. A server responding to pings reveals itself because handling incoming connections and sending packets in response is an active process. If the leather had undergone some sort of chemical process, say, an oxidation, and this had made the script apparent, I think it would be reasonable to say that the fragments were revealing the lettering. However, as far as I can see, nothing has changed about the scroll, nor even about our technological ability to interrogate it - rather, someone simply attempted to look closer than had been done so before. Etymologically, 'reveal' is of the same heritage as 'unveil' - both are essentially analogies to the removing of a veil, and as such have the connotation of action. Only in a poetic context would I personally think it appropriate to use 'reveal' in a passive sense - as in your example of objects revealing themselves on exposure to light. This is of course just wot i rekon. I would probably chose 'divulge' over 'reveal' in the title of the OP article.
- derefr 6y ago> However, as far as I can see, nothing has changed about the scroll, nor even about our technological ability to interrogate it - rather, someone simply attempted to look closer than had been done so before. I believe one common usage of "reveal" is that an autostereogram ("Magic Eye" picture) reveals a 3D image when you focus on it correctly. Nothing about the picture changes; nothing about your eyes change, either, really. It's just "looking closer." But the 3D object was obscure, and now it's been... revealed. Revealed by what? By whom? Not too clear. I guess, in the Dead-Sea-Scroll-fragments case, it actually is clear: it was revealed by a microscope.
- catalogia 6y ago"Text revealed in Dead Sea Scroll fragments previously considered blank."
- bregma 6y ago"Scroll Writers Hate This One Trick... click to reveal new text"
- ARandomerDude 6y ago> It's a poorly written headline, the scrolls themselves did not perform the reveal. Material versus efficient cause. The scrolls are the material cause of the revelation, the researchers are the efficient cause of the revelation. Both reveal the text.
- 0xdeadbeefbabe 6y agoA joke with no punchline
- gibolt 6y agoThey found zero-width space characters!
- curlypaul924 6y agoI thought the same thing and found myself, for a moment, awed that this might be the first documented use of spoiler tags.
- jagannathtech 6y agoThey just used input hidden ;)
- every 6y agoAh, for the want of a comma...
- runxel 6y agoIt certainly would have helped, no?
- kace91 6y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden-path_sentence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden-path_sentence
- nerdponx 6y ago2 commas would solve everything.
- throwaway_pdp09 6y agoNear me there's some roadworks. There's a sign that says exactly "Narrow Road Don't Overtake Cyclists" but perhaps they meant "Narrow Road Don't Overtake, Cyclists" The comma inverts the meaning. I still don't know which they intended.
- hackissimo123 6y agoObligatory Simpsons reference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5yuL6PcgSgM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5yuL6PcgSgM
- jfengel 6y agoA local hospital put up some motivational signs, in crayon. One reads, "Medical workers: not all heros wear capes". But it's written on three lines in three different colors, so it reads like "Medical workers: Not All Heroes. Wear capes!"
- coldpie 6y agoUnrelated but similar article about using X-rays to read text on paper fragments used during the binding process in the medieval ages: https://medievalbooks.nl/2015/12/18/x-rays-expose-a-hidden-medieval-library/ https://medievalbooks.nl/2015/12/18/x-rays-expose-a-hidden-m... The whole MedievalBooks.nl blog is fascinating, lots of good reading there.
- redtexture 6y agoThank you for that link.
- seemslegit 6y agoThe text is "This scroll was intentionally left blank"
- rukittenme 6y agoI love how most papers start with this contradiction. Really sets the tone.
- dibujante 6y ago"This page aspirationally left blank."
- rantwasp 6y agoi thought the used a blink tag and set the interval to 2000 years
- perl4ever 6y ago"You can't write that! It's obscene!"
- toyg 6y agoIf you’re ever in Manchester, the John Rylands Library mentioned here is one of the local jewels and absolutely worth the visit. If you are a library connoisseur, there are also Chatham’s (one of the oldest libraries in the land, and likely the oldest dedicated to music), the Pantheon-inspired Central Library, and the elusive (and exclusive) Portico. The Law Library was pretty striking too but sadly they moved and the original building was sold.
- ddoran 6y agoThis is Manchester, UK, not Manchester, NH nor Manchester, VT.
- toyg 6y agoYes of course. Afaik there is only one John Rylands Library in the world :)
- haack 6y agoI already found it frustratingly ambiguous that there could be more than one Manchester in the US, then I checked and it turns out there are more than 30
- macintux 6y agoI don’t remember any examples off-hand, but we have a few town names in Indiana which aren’t even unique within the state, because one of the locations isn’t incorporated.
- dgorges 6y ago> The Dead Sea Scrolls are ancient Jewish religious manuscripts that were found in the Qumran Caves in the Judaean Desert, near Ein Feshkha on the northern shore of the Dead Sea in the West Bank. Scholarly consensus dates these scrolls from the last three centuries BCE and the first century CE. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Sea_Scrolls https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Sea_Scrolls
- chrsstrm 6y agoI went to a Jesuit university and was required to take a certain number of credits in religious courses, so I looked over the catalogue and chose the most interesting and less mainstream options, like classes on Yoga and Buddhism. One of the classes I chose was about the history of the Old Testament from an archaeological perspective, which sounded very Indiana Jones and turned out to be quite interesting. The professor was an archaeologist and had dug at some of the sites we studied in the course. The only thing I remember from that class was the story how the Bedouin were shopping the scrolls before the location of the caves were exposed and the Western archaeologist (who couldn't immediately travel to the site and wanted to obtain the scrolls at any cost) offered to pay them per piece. This is very likely how many of the scrolls were torn into tiny pieces, as Bedouin were looking to maximize their payout. I didn't find any reference to this in the linked wiki and I certainly don't know how true the story is (IIRC this story wasn't in our official class texts either), but it's something to consider that we could have a more-intact set of scrolls today had it not been for a terrible decision made in haste.
- toyg 6y agoIt might have well been a mistranslation. Stating that you're so desperate to buy that you'll accept "the tiniest bits you can find" could sound like a reasonable thing to say to transmit urgency; then a translator approximates to "he will pay for every small piece" and you're screwed.
- koheripbal 6y agoIt is extremely difficult to do archeology in many countries in the middle-east, even pre-war. Turkey, for example refuses most requests for digs. It is generally understood that they don't want excessive religious historical context placed on their country as it doesn't mesh well with their current national identity.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- qwerty456127 6y agoWhat is it?
- qwerty456127 6y agoI mean the revealed text - what does it say?
- gxqoz 6y agoRelated: The Museum of the Bible in DC recently admitted their "Dead Sea Scrolls" were forgeries: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/history/2020/03/museum-of-the-bible-dead-sea-scrolls-forgeries/ https://www.nationalgeographic.com/history/2020/03/museum-of... And a longer piece about a forged first-century gospel from the same institution: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/06/museum-of-the-bible-obbink-gospel-of-mark/610576/ https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/06/museum-...
- sb057 6y agoA very important note a few paragraphs in to the National Geographic article: >The new findings don’t cast doubt on the 100,000 real Dead Sea Scroll fragments, most of which lie in the Shrine of the Book, part of the Israel Museum, Jerusalem. However, the report’s findings raise grave questions about the “post-2002” Dead Sea Scroll fragments, a group of some 70 snippets of biblical text that entered the antiquities market in the 2000s. Even before the new report, some scholars believed that most to all of the post-2002 fragments were modern fakes.
- memling 6y ago> And a longer piece about a forged first-century gospel from the same institution: As a clarification to this comment, the article does not say that the fragment is a forgery; rather it says that the claims of its age were fraudulent, or at least misleading, and that the process by which it was obtained was likely criminal. (If it was stolen, I think it has been returned, since it's in the Egypt Exploration Society collection now.) This is a different matter than the DSS fragments, which NatGeo says were created in modern times.