This is Scientific American 62nd Science.

I'm Cynthia Graber.

In the 1970s, researchers unearthing an ancient synagogue at Ain Getty near the Dead Sea

discovered the structure's holy arc, the container in which early

Jews would have stored the Bible as they prayed. The site was home to a large Jewish community

from about 800 B.C.E.e.e.e.

That fire blackened and burned the scrolls in the ark.

They crumbled if touched.

So the Israeli scientists locked them away until now.

Pina Shore at the Israel Antiquities Authority reached out to computer scientist Brent Seals

at the University of Kentucky to see if he and his colleagues could use new technologies

to peer inside a scroll without

unrolling it. They call the technique virtual unwrapping. Brent Seals explains.

First we have to find the layers within the scanned volume. Finding evidence of those layers is called segmentation so there's a process for that once we find those layers we create a texture on those layers that comes from the scan volume itself and that's where the ink evidence gets situated onto the layer surface.

And then the final step is this unwrapping where we flatten out that surface which is not actually flat, it's three

dimensional, so that we can merge the pieces together and see the completely unwrapped scroll.

They applied this technique to the Ingetti scroll.

The first time we saw the text was in the lab,

and of course I don't speak or read Hebrew,

but we knew that it was writing because of the systematic way

the markings were lining up.

Our early versions were not as clear

...