Dead Sea Scrolls now on Google

Ultra-high resolution images of the Dead Sea Scrolls, which contain the oldest copies of many biblical texts and secular writings on life in the 1st and 2nd centuries AD, are now available on Google.

A project launched Monday by the Israel Museum and Google Inc. makes the ancient scrolls available to search and read online, Bloomberg News reports. Through the project, entire scrolls are viewable and readers can zoom in and read the text as well as an English translation.

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“This gives you a way to understand the beginning of biblical history,” museum director James Snyder told Bloomberg. “Nothing could be more important.”

It is believed that the scrolls, which are too fragile to handle direct light, were written by a Jewish sect in Qumran in the Judean Desert. It is thought that they were hidden in caves along the Dead Sea's shore around 70 AD, when the Romans destroyed the templed in Jerusalem. They were discovered between 1947 and 1956.

Sections of the scrolls are on display in Israel, but they must be rotated to minimize exposure.

The project, which gives viewers access to 1,200 megapixel images, captured five scrolls including the Temple Scroll and Great Isaiah Scroll, BBC reports.

"Ardon Bar-Hama, a noted photographer of antiquities, used ultraviolet-protected flash tubes to light the scrolls for 1/4000th of a second. The exposure time – which is much shorter than a conventional camera flash – was designed to protect the scrolls from damage," it states.