The Dead Sea Scrolls are some of the most valuable religious texts known to man. Discovered between 1947 and 1956 at Khirbet Qumran, they form the oldest known versions of Biblical documents and take the form of 972 texts. Their age dates them at somewhere between 150 BCE and 70CE when they were hidden in caves to prevent the Roman armies from discovering them. That they survived so long is incredible.

Due to the age of the documents, and the fact they have been written on parchment and papyrus, it’s understandable the fragile originals are kept at The Israel Museum in Jerusalem in a sealed container. If you want to see them, until now you had to go visit.

Gaining access to the original texts has now become a lot easier due to a new project launched by Google called the Dead Sea Scrolls online. Five of the scrolls have been digitized using high resolution 1,200 megapixel photographs captured by renowned photographer Ardon Bar-Hama.

As well as being able to view the texts in great detail, there’s also a translation feature on the site presenting the original Hebrew in English. There’s also a search feature based on keywords and passages from the text, and you can leave comments for others to read.

Google is taking care of hosting all the data for this project in its ongoing bid to make the world’s information accessible to all. Behind the website and high resolution images you will find Google Storage and Google App Engine hard at work serving up the data for what must already be a very popular destination.

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