Monday, June 3, 2013

Oldest Torah Scroll-Italy


The University of Bologna in Italy has originated what it says might be the oldest absolute scroll of Judaism's most significant text, the Torah.
The scroll was in the university library but had been mislabeled, a professor at the university says. It was formerly thought the scroll was no more than a few hundred years old.
Though, after carbon dating tests, the university has said the text may have been printed more than 850 years ago.
The university's Professor of Hebrew Mauro Perani says this would make it the oldest complete text of the Torah known to exist, and an object of strange worth.
The university says that in 1889 one of its librarians, Leonello Modona, had examined the scroll and dated it to the 17th Century.
However, when Prof Perani recently re-examined the scroll, he grasped the script used was that of the oriental Babylonian convention, importance that the scroll must be tremendously old.
Another reason for the dating is that the text has many features prohibited in later copies under rules laid down by the scholar Maimonides in the 12th Century, the university says.

For more interesting topics related to archaeology, visit archaeology excavations.

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