Making Ancient Manuscripts Readable : Photos Giving New Life to Fading Dead Sea Scrolls

While Arab youths were rioting in the streets of East Jerusalem in January, photographer Ken Zuckerman was in the basement of the city’s Albright Institute using a dusty, long-neglected darkroom to develop photos of one of the historically important Dead Sea Scrolls.

Zuckerman and his brother Bruce, a USC professor of religion, had been allowed by the Israeli government to photograph two of the 2,000-year-old scrolls, one of which had deteriorated rapidly. After two days of work, the Los Angeles pair hoped that they had finally found the right combination of lighting, film and filters to bring out the writing on the dark, gooey piece of leather.

“When we looked at the column of text we were working on with the naked eye, we saw absolutely nothing, not a single word,” he said. “But when we developed the film and looked at it through a (magnifying glass), suddenly we could make out letters and words. Then we knew we had it.”

The pair, together with team leader James H. Charlesworth of Princeton Theological Seminary, “really wanted to celebrate,” Ken Zuckerman said, but everything in East Jerusalem was shut down by the unrest. “The best we could do was go back to our room and make a pot of tea,” he chuckled.

The brothers Zuckerman represent a new breed of archeologists, specialists who travel the world to photographically record ancient manuscripts before their contents are lost to the ravages of time. The pair--one a civil engineer who learned photography working on the space program, the other an expert on the ancient languages of the Middle East--have an unusual blend of expertise that has ranked them among the best in the business.

“Good photographs are vital” in archeology, said Richard Fazzini, a curator at the Brooklyn Museum. Photographs can show writing that is no longer visible to the eye and permit scholars to study texts without handling fragile documents unnecessarily. “And the Zuckermans made good photographs for us,” he said.

With the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Zuckermans faced their biggest challenge yet.

They have just begun to process their films of the scrolls, but Bruce Zuckerman is confident that their photos will provide new insights into the era and the development of the Christian religion. “Just guessing, I would say we’ve captured 20% of the document that scholars have never seen before,” he said.

The Dead Sea Scrolls are a trove of several thousand ancient texts and fragments found between 1947 and 1960 in caves near the Dead Sea. Their discovery greatly advanced biblical scholarship.

Many of the scrolls are the oldest existing manuscripts of books in the Old Testament, while others include Psalm-like writings, biblical commentaries and a prophecy of a war to come between the forces of light and darkness.

Several of the scrolls have been preserved in fairly good shape, but others have decayed or fallen into fragments over the centuries. The cycles of moisture and dryness in the caves leached the plant-based ink from many of the goat-skin scrolls.

One work the team studied, the Genesis Apocryphon, is a popularized Aramaic version of the Book of Genesis, complete with a detailed description of the beauties of Sarah, Abraham’s wife, and first-person accounts of the lives of Noah and other well-known figures.

Ritual Purity Rules

The second, known as the Temple Scroll, includes rigid rules on ritual purity that Jewish sectarians wanted to be observed upon construction of a new temple. Most scholars say the writings were by the Essenes, an extremist group apparently at odds with the Jerusalem Establishment.

Major portions of both scrolls have already been published, but scholars hope that the Zuckermans’ photographic techniques will bring new insights into the life and thought of Jesus’ contemporaries. Most texts are thought to have been written before the time of Jesus.

The brothers worked solidly during their 18 days in Jerusalem, not even stopping for lunch during periods when they were allowed access to the scrolls. Evenings were spent unloading and reloading film magazines, updating their log book and doing other housekeeping tasks. They produced the equivalent of more than 250 rolls of film.

Their greatest success came when they lit the fragile scrolls from behind and used a special Japanese-made infrared film and a yellow filter. But Ken Zuckerman noted that they took at least 12 photos of every column of the scrolls, using different combinations of films and filters to ensure that all the details were brought out.

‘Going to Be Recoverable’

Although no one has yet read the text in the new photographs, “Vast amounts of these lost sections of the narrative are going to be recoverable without any doubt,” said New Testament scholar Charlesworth, who recruited the Zuckermans for the Jerusalem project.

“There will be a quantum leap in the amount of text to be read,” he said.

“It seems now from the little we’ve seen that their labor was worth it, but exactly how much we will learn, it is premature to say,” said Magen Broshi, curator of the Shrine of the Book, a wing of the Israel Museum in Jerusalem that holds about 800 of the scrolls.

“The hunger is tremendous to find out all we can,” said James A. Sanders, head of the Ancient Biblical Manuscript Center at the Claremont School of Theology.

“If anybody can bring up those portions that were illegible before,” then the Zuckermans will do it, Sanders said.

Bruce Zuckerman will discuss the Dead Sea Scrolls project for the first time publicly in a lecture Wednesday at the Gallery Theater at Barnsdall Park, sponsored by the California Museum of Ancient Art.

The brothers did not set out to become a photographic team, although Ken Zuckerman, 43, has been fascinated by cameras since childhood. He got his start in technical photography while working on his master’s degree in civil engineering at Caltech, specializing in soil mechanics.

Astronauts had returned part of the Surveyor spacecraft from the moon, and “they needed photographic analysis of the effects of soil and the environment on the spacecraft,” he said.

“I got assigned that particular job because I was the only one in the lab who knew anything about photography,” he added. “A lot of the techniques I learned in that work later turned out to be applicable to photographing ancient documents.”

After graduation, he started his own company, the Los Angeles-based Zuckerman Building Co., which builds residential developments, and did not think much about serious photography.

Meanwhile, Bruce Zuckerman, 40, was obtaining a doctorate in Near Eastern languages at Yale University, specializing in the languages most closely associated with the Bible. In his first research projects while he was on the staff of the Harvard Semitic Museum, he said, “I was constantly frustrated because the quality of the photographic information was so poor.”

Engrossed in Debates

Archeologists would become engrossed in heated debates about particular texts, with immense implications for understanding the history of the ancient Near East, he said. “And what were they arguing about? Whether a certain mark was merely a dent, a scratch, or an actual letter.”

The problems arose because photographing ancient manuscripts “is very demanding, and there are no books to teach you how to do it,” Bruce said. “When scholars who don’t know anything about cameras do it, the results are terrible. And the photographers are illiterate in the languages of the texts, so they don’t know what to highlight.”

During that period, Ken Zuckerman went east frequently on business, and would usually stop in Boston to visit with Bruce. The two brothers would talk about the problems Ken was facing and discuss ways to solve them. Eventually, Ken began to accompany Bruce on photographic field trips.

They have photographed manuscripts in the Louvre Museum in Paris, Aramaic papyri in the Staatlische Museen in Berlin, a rare text of the Gospels at the remote St. Catherine’s Monastery on the Sinai Peninsula and the oldest Jewish manuscripts in the United States at the Brooklyn Museum.

Over the years, they assembled what Ken Zuckerman calls his “bag of tricks,” a portable collection of cameras, flashes, filters and other accessories. “You really don’t know what is going to work and what isn’t, so you have to be prepared to try everything,” he said. “They don’t send you a sample in an envelope so that you can take several months to decide what you will do when you get there.”

Only One Chance

And you have to get it right the first time. When they finished photographing the 364 fragile goat-skin vellums at St. Catherine’s Monastery in 1985, Bruce said, “the monks said they were going to put the manuscripts in storage and not let anyone else see them.”

Bruce Zuckerman has begun using other Space Age technology as well. He has contracted with Micro Expert Systems, a small Calabasas software company, to develop techniques for computer enhancement of the images similar to the techniques used in the space program. That technique should be particularly valuable on the St. Catherine’s manuscripts, where the original Biblical writings were scraped off so the vellum could be used again.

Zuckerman hopes that the computer can alter the image so that the later writings are erased, leaving only the restored image of the original text. He hopes also to enhance the images from the Dead Sea Scrolls.

Bruce Zuckerman wants to go back to Jerusalem and to St. Catherine’s Monastery to record other ancient documents, but he hopes one day to carry out his dream job--one that would be “totally impossible to do,” especially since his wife would disapprove.

“What I’d dearly like to do more than anything else . . . is to photograph materials in the Beirut National Museum,” he said.

Located near the Green Line that separates the Christian and Muslim sections of the war-stricken Lebanese capital, the Beirut museum holds some of the oldest known Phoenician and Aramaic documents written with the precursors of today’s alphabet.

“These documents are intrinsically important and not as well documented as they should be, and they’re in the most danger,” he said.

“If I could do one thing and get out alive, that would be it.”