Mladen Popović awarded ERC Advanced Grant to trace the origins of the Dead Sea Scrolls
Professor Mladen Popović has been awarded an ERC Advanced Grant of €2.5 million. Under the project title ‘Tracing Tribes and Scrolls’, he and his team will spend the next five years working in the laboratory and using AI to trace the origins of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Frank van Tubergen, Professor of Sociology at Utrecht University, theme leader Migration and Migrants at NIDI and, since February, Honorary Professor at the University of Groningen, has also been awarded an ERC Advanced Grant.
About Popović’s project
In the ‘Tracing Scribes and Scrolls’ project, Popović (Faculty of Religion, Culture and Society and interim dean of the Faculty of Arts) and his colleagues aim to trace the origins and creation of the Dead Sea Scrolls by adopting an interdisciplinary approach to the issue: using analytical chemistry, AI and palaeography (the study of handwriting), they aim to determine where the scrolls were made and written. This could shed new light on the historical and cultural context of the scrolls.
The researchers will link this new knowledge to the palaeographic insights gained from Popović’s previous ERC project, The Hands That Wrote the Bible. This will enable them not only to identify individual scribes chronologically, but also geographically. In this way, Popović and his team aim to discover where the scribes of the Dead Sea Scrolls carried out their work and, in doing so, to map out for the first time specific locations associated with literature, creativity and the social networks of intellectuals in ancient Judea. Groups that have been largely invisible throughout history are thus made more visible. In addition, the researchers aim to shed new light on the dissemination of biblical and many other types of texts in ancient Judea and possibly beyond.
The Dead Sea Scrolls are a collection of manuscripts that, amongst other things, form the basis of the Old Testament. They were written over 2,000 years ago in Ancient Hebrew. They contain the manuscripts of all the books of the Old Testament and are the oldest surviving texts of Judaism and Christianity. Popović has been conducting pioneering research into the Dead Sea Scrolls for many years. Just last year, he published a study showing that many Dead Sea Scrolls are older than previously thought.
About Van Tubergen’s project
The project led by Van Tubergen (Professor of Sociology at Utrecht University, Honorary Professor at the UG Faculty of Behavioural and Social Sciences and theme leader Migration and Migrants at NIDI) aims to gain a better understanding of how social cohesion develops among young people growing up in increasingly diverse societies. Rather than simply looking at differences between young people with and without a migrant background, the project examines relationships within and between different groups of young people. It also focuses on various aspects of social cohesion, such as friendship, trust, loneliness and experiences of discrimination.
About the ERC Advanced Grants
The European Research Council’s (ERC) Advanced Grants are open to established researchers of all nationalities and ages. With an ERC grant, they can undertake groundbreaking and ambitious projects to explore new directions in their field of research.
The ERC is Europe’s leading funding organisation for excellent, ground-breaking research. Every year, it selects and funds the very best creative researchers of all nationalities and ages to lead projects across Europe.