Modern Technology Illuminates Ancient Texts Response 1

Rubi Gatica, Italy Gatica, Danya Archilla

Laura Metzger

ENGL 1302

2/13/15

Modern Technology Illuminates Ancient Texts Response 1

            The world has come so far in the past few years with the first colonization to discovering new worlds in the giant abyss that is the galaxy. So much is needed to be learned and taught, and so much to be discovered and analyzed yet so little time the earth gives us. As years and centuries go by, we start to faintly and slowly discover the world that existed before technology ruled. In this fantastic article posted, it talks about how technology today helps find and analyze old scripts that help give us a new perspective and a new vision of what the old days used to be.

            In this article it talks about how these very old scrolls were found in a cave in 1947 by shepherds and are the most important discovery to modern archeology. The scripts are said to have some information on the great city of Palestine and that they were written around the time that Jesus was alive. They are named The Dead Sea Scrolls. Though the discovery was great and everybody was very enthusiastic to see what the old scroll held, as time went by since then many of the scripts were deteriorating to the point where the scripts weren’t readable and the parchment blackened. Scholars couldn’t read them and the information was going to be lost. It would take years to try and study the scroll and at the rate that it was going many of the scrolls would be to weathered and damaged that they wouldn’t extract the information needed.

            That is when modern technology comes into place and saves the day. Technology is the application of scientific knowledge for practical purposes, especially in industry. Technology has come very far in the past decade and has helped the world modernize and keep the world going. Technology now can help discover new things and learn so much in a few months than in the past decades where scientist and scholars would find or discover something new and it would take them over a decade to analyze thoroughly.

            Gregory Bearman, a physicist from the US Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), helped these scholars to try and read the badly damaged scripts using modern technology. Bearman used multi-spectral imaging to help and distinguish the black ink from the black parchment. In other words, light reflects from different substances which create different wavelengths. Bearman used this technique to help detect the black inked words from the black parchment. It worked like a charm! Scholars now were able to read the blackened parchment and the text that they couldn’t reach. Now they could read and translate the words faster and easier without the fear of losing the ancient text.

            Technology, without the doubt, helped these scholars job a little easier. If technology can help these scholars with these very delicate ancient texts, imagine what else technology can do?  What if technology can help you teleport and the gas situation was fixed? Or what if technology can help you live longer? Technology still has a long way to go yet, but the future looks promising.