has copied the Dead Sea Scrolls digitally, creating extremely high resolution image with amazing detail, and they are available now for online viewing. In the past, Google has come under fire for scanning books and making them available online, but this latest project will not, in all probability, cause any lawsuits.

Google worked together with The Israel Museum in Jerusalem to bring to life online the over 2,000-year-old documents. Google couldn’t handle the ancient and consequently fragile manuscripts the way they normally would when scanning books. The five documents were instead posed for photographing, with the resulting images being up to 1,200 megapixels in size.

Viewers can zoom in, seeing every detail on the page, thanks to the enormous size of the images, without any need to handle the pages which are animal skins only a tenth of a millimeter thick and extremely fragile. In addition to this being the first time the documents have been available for online viewing, it’s also the first time they’ve been able to be viewed outside Jerusalem.

For those who may not remember the story behind the Dead Sea Scrolls, they were written between the first and third centuries BCE, and were hidden in 68 BCE in the Judean desert in 11 caves on the shores of the Dead Sea in order to protect them from invading Romans. They remained hidden there until they were discovered by a local shepherd in 1947.

The Dead Sea Scrolls project is only the first step in the Google master plan, with subsequent work being done with The Israel Museum to make available online several important cultural and historical collections.

To view the scrolls follow this link.

(Via: Digital Trends)