Dataset Information

Forensic document examination and algorithmic handwriting analysis of Judahite biblical period inscriptions reveal significant literacy level.

ABSTRACT: Arad is a well preserved desert fort on the southern frontier of the biblical kingdom of Judah. Excavation of the site yielded over 100 Hebrew ostraca (ink inscriptions on potsherds) dated to ca. 600 BCE, the eve of Nebuchadnezzar's destruction of Jerusalem. Due to the site's isolation, small size and texts that were written in a short time span, the Arad corpus holds important keys to understanding dissemination of literacy in Judah. Here we present the handwriting analysis of 18 Arad inscriptions, including more than 150 pair-wise assessments of writer's identity. The examination was performed by two new algorithmic handwriting analysis methods and independently by a professional forensic document examiner. To the best of our knowledge, no such large-scale pair-wise assessments of ancient documents by a forensic expert has previously been published. Comparison of forensic examination with algorithmic analysis is also unique. Our study demonstrates substantial agreement between the results of these independent methods of investigation. Remarkably, the forensic examination reveals a high probability of at least 12 writers within the analyzed corpus. This is a major increment over the previously published algorithmic estimations, which revealed 4-7 writers for the same assemblage. The high literacy rate detected within the small Arad stronghold, estimated (using broadly-accepted paleo-demographic coefficients) to have accommodated 20-30 soldiers, demonstrates widespread literacy in the late 7th century BCE Judahite military and administration apparatuses, with the ability to compose biblical texts during this period a possible by-product.

SUBMITTER: Shaus A

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7480862 | biostudies-literature | 2020

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Forensic document examination and algorithmic handwriting analysis of Judahite biblical period inscriptions reveal significant literacy level.

Shaus Arie A Gerber Yana Y Faigenbaum-Golovin Shira S Sober Barak B Piasetzky Eli E Finkelstein Israel I

PloS one 20200909 9

Arad is a well preserved desert fort on the southern frontier of the biblical kingdom of Judah. Excavation of the site yielded over 100 Hebrew ostraca (ink inscriptions on potsherds) dated to ca. 600 BCE, the eve of Nebuchadnezzar's destruction of Jerusalem. Due to the site's isolation, small size and texts that were written in a short time span, the Arad corpus holds important keys to understanding dissemination of literacy in Judah. Here we present the handwriting analysis of 18 Arad inscripti ...[more]

PMID: 32903283

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Project description:This article presents a dataset of hyperspectral images of handwriting samples collected from 54 individuals. The purpose of the presented dataset is to further explore the use of hyperspectral imaging in document image analysis and to benchmark the performance of forensic analysis methods for hyperspectral document images. Each hyperspectral cube in the dataset has a spatial resolution of 512 × 650 pixels and contains 149 spectral channels in the spectral range of 478-901 nm. All the individuals have different personalities and have their writing patterns. The information of age and gender of each individual is collected. Each subject has written twenty-eight sentences using 12 different varieties of pens from different brands in blue color, each approximately 9 words or 33 characters long, all English alphabets in capital and small cases, digits from 0 to 9. The previous methods use synthetic mixed samples created by joining different parts of the images from the UWA WIHSI dataset.Each document consists of real mixed samples written withdifferent pens and by different writers with a variety of mixing ratios of inks and writers for forensic analysis.The standard A4 pages, each weighing 70 gs and manufactured by "AA" company, are used for data collection. The handwritten notes written by each subject with different pens are annotated in rectangular boxes. This dataset can be used for several tasks related to hyperspectral document image analysis and document forensic analysis including, handwritten optical character recognition, ink mismatch detection, writer identification at sentence, word, and character-level, handwriting-based gender classification, handwriting-based age prediction, handwritten word segmentation, and word generation. This dataset was designed and collected by the research team at the Artificial intelligence and Computer Vision Lab (iVision), Institute of Space Technology, Pakistan, and the hyperspectral images were acquired through imaging spectroscopy in the visible wavelength range at Wageningen University & Research, the Netherlands.

Dataset Information

Forensic document examination and algorithmic handwriting analysis of Judahite biblical period inscriptions reveal significant literacy level.

Publications

Forensic document examination and algorithmic handwriting analysis of Judahite biblical period inscriptions reveal significant literacy level.

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