The finding of the Dead Sea Scrolls has been called „the greatest archaeological discovery oft he 20th century“ and are of paramount importance in the monotheistic world heritage. The scrolls are housed in the Israel Museum’s Shrine of the Book and the five most important of them have now been made available online by Google.

Both amateur and professional scholars and photographers will now be able to interact with these five digitized scrolls. The high resolution photographs, taken by renowned photographer Ardon Bar-Hama, are up to 1200 megapixels and entailed using special flashes of 1/4000 of a second to avoid damaging the fragile parchments.

The photos were taken using ALPA 12 MAX camera body, top performance lenses and a LEAF digital back. The high resolution images can be seen online where Google’s map-viewing technology allows us to magnify and explore the original Hebrew text or to click on any passage to get an immediate English translation.
 

Ardon at work

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