Those rules would have forbidden him from using some of the graphical elements found here, such as use of compression of letters, line justification, and which letters can have "crowns" on top. This scroll's copyist did not know of those rules.
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In addition, a second carbon-14 test at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign confirmed the first result.Įven before you received the authentication of the carbon-14 dating, were there clues that led you to focus on an early date?Īt the end of the 12th century Maimonides set down the rules for how to copy Torah scrolls, and those fixed rules have been followed ever since. I then pursued carbon-14 testing at the University of Sorrento the results showed a date of between second half of the 12th century to beginning of the 13th century. I consulted with other colleagues and experts who agreed that this scroll originated from some time between the end of the 11th and the beginning of the 14th century. These Hebrew letters were in the Oriental style, not of Palestine, but of the Babylonian tradition, and from a much earlier time than the 17th century. He described the writing in this scroll as "an Italian script, rather clumsy-looking, in which certain letters, as well as the usual crowns and strokes, show uncommon and strange appendices." But when I went to examine the scroll, I saw immediately that it was not the "bad" writing that Modona described. He had dated this scroll to the 17th century with a question mark. The original librarian and cataloguer from 1889, Leonello Modona, was an educated man but not a scholar. In 2012, a colleague and I decided to write a new catalog of the library's Hebrew manuscript collection. What led you to take a second look at the scroll? National Geographic spoke by telephone to Perani about his rediscovery. What a 19th-century cataloguer had interpreted as clumsy mistakes by what he guessed was an awkward 17th-century scribe provided the very clues that led Perani to investigate further.
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Like all Torah scrolls, this one contains the full text of the five Books of Moses in Hebrew and is prepared according to strict standards for use during religious services. The scroll dates to between 11, making it the oldest complete Torah scroll on record.
This week, University of Bologna Professor Mauro Perani announced the results of carbon-14 tests authenticating the scroll's age as roughly 800 years old. In 1889, an Italian librarian's faulty identification sentenced to archival obscurity an antique Torah scroll that has turned out to be the oldest complete such scroll in existence.
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