Google and Israel’s national museum, the Israel Museum, have come together to place a number of the world-famous Dead Sea Scrolls online for the first time. The project is the first of many hoping to showcase some of the manuscripts that make up what many consider the most important archaeological find of the 20th century.

The use of a high-tech $250 000 camera allowed researchers to photograph and distinguish words and other details not normally visible to the naked eye.

A former NASA scientist began photographing the pieces earlier this month in an attempt to place the high-resolution images of the scrolls online for the world to see.

Readers will be able to zoom in on the images, translate verses into English and search for specific verses.

You’ll now have access to the Book of Isaiah, a manuscript known as the Temple Scroll, and three others. This is however, part of a broader project that will seek to place thousands of fragments from 900 Dead Sea manuscripts online in a similar manner.

Many of those are held by the Israel Antiquities Authority, and in private collections, and will be an attempt to bring history closer to scholars of all forms.

The Associated Press reports from Jerusalem:

The scrolls… are thought to have been written or collected by an ascetic Jewish sect that fled Jerusalem for the desert 2 000 years ago and settled at Qumran, on the banks of the Dead Sea.

The hundreds of manuscripts that survived, partially or in full, in caves near the site, have shed light on the development of the Hebrew Bible and the origins of Christianity.

Bedouin shepherds in the Judean Desert first located some of the scrolls before Israeli researchers purchased them between 1947 and 1967.

Like you’d see in any good movie, the originals are housed in a specifically designed vault in a Jerusalem building that requires at least three different keys, a magnetic card and a secret code to gain entrance.Two other important manuscripts, the Apocryphon of Daniel, an Aramaic text that includes a verse referring to a figure who “will be called the son of God,” and a fragment of the Thanksgiving Scroll should be online by the end of the year.

You can follow this link to see the digital versions of the scrolls.

[Source: AP via Yahoo]