Five Dead Sea Scrolls available for Internet users

The Israel Museum in Jerusalem began on Monday to upload the Dead Sea scrolls, which contain some of the oldest known biblical texts.

"Users can explore with an eye for detail and accuracy previously impossible to obtain manuscripts dating from the Second Temple period," it said in a statement on the direction of the museum where the manuscripts are housed two millennia old.

These documents "are extremely important because they form the foundation of the monotheistic world heritage," insists the text.

"Details are invisible to the naked eye can be enlarged up to 1,200 megapixels, a resolution 200 times that of an ordinary camera," it said.

The project was developed in partnership with the Google internet with the aim to make documents freely available to the general public, and its cost is estimated at $ 3.5 million (2.5 million).

Five rolls are already available on the Internet, including the great manuscript of Isaiah.

The 900 manuscripts, parchment and papyrus, found between 1947 and 1956 in caves at Qumran, above the Dead Sea, is considered one of the most important archaeological discoveries of all time. They include religious texts in Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek, and the oldest known Old Testament.

The oldest documents date from the 3rd century BC and the latest was written in AD 70, when the destruction of the Second Jewish Temple by the Roman legions.

When not exposed, the manuscripts are kept in the dark, a reserve whose humidity and temperature are the same as the caves of Qumran.