Dead Sea Scroll fragments thought to be blank reveal text
manchester.ac.uk
manchester.ac.uk
> reveal, v. ts., 1. make (previously unknown or secret information) known to others.
If I turn on a flashlight in a dark room, I reveal the contents of the room; but the flashlight also reveals the contents of the room; and at the lowest level, the light from the flashlight reveals the contents of the room. One could go even deeper, and say that the objects "reveal themselves", as the pigments in the objects react to the light by transmitting information about the objects to my eyes (unlike stealth planes or dark matter, which do not reveal themselves in response to light.)
A server can "reveal" information by transmitting it to you, in response to your request for it. A server reveals itself when it responds to a ping. A server that ignores pings and portscans is avoiding revealing itself.
Basically, any entity in the causal chain for information being produced—even a non-agentive one—seems capable of "revealing" in English.
(Perhaps you're thinking of "unveil"? That word implies that there's a thing external to the information—a veil/curtain—and requires an agentive entity to act upon it.)
Etymologically, 'reveal' is of the same heritage as 'unveil' - both are essentially analogies to the removing of a veil, and as such have the connotation of action. Only in a poetic context would I personally think it appropriate to use 'reveal' in a passive sense - as in your example of objects revealing themselves on exposure to light.
This is of course just wot i rekon. I would probably chose 'divulge' over 'reveal' in the title of the OP article.
I believe one common usage of "reveal" is that an autostereogram ("Magic Eye" picture) reveals a 3D image when you focus on it correctly. Nothing about the picture changes; nothing about your eyes change, either, really. It's just "looking closer." But the 3D object was obscure, and now it's been... revealed. Revealed by what? By whom? Not too clear.
I guess, in the Dead-Sea-Scroll-fragments case, it actually is clear: it was revealed by a microscope.
"The dim glow of the light revealed a pair of feet"
"The dust revealed a group of riders returning"
"an inrush of air, clearing the smoke, revealed a scene of utter devastation"
"When a 30-MW Q-switched ruby laser was focused into water, the resulting spark revealed a blackbody-like spectrum with a temperature of 15,000K"
the dust is the noun that acts to reveal riders.
the air is the noun that acts to reveal devastation.
the spark is the noun that acts to reveal the spectrum.
In none of those examples were the feet, rider, devastation or spectrum the nouns that the verb reveal refers to as acting.
Reveal can be used as a verb, but in the title in question, the noun is Dead Sea Scrolls not "the Professor, the investigation, or the scanner" that did the revealing. The Dead Sea Scrolls did not act on their own to reveal something, they were acted upon.
However, if you want to make the distinction, there are innumerable examples of similar usage, where written material is said to reveal something.
"these pages revealed the power of words to us as though for the first time"
"The book revealed to me a whole frightening world"
"The alchemists really believed that the Emerald Tablet revealed truths too powerful for most people to handle"
"Aside from the joke, the letter revealed his youthful trait of uttering labored, high-sounding but unsubstantial phrases"
But why exactly are you fixated on the idea that written things can't act, while apparently pretty much any other abstract or inanimate object can?
The structure of the original sentence is just harder to parse at first glance because it's missing words or punctuation, or written in the wrong order.
"Text revealed on Dead Sea Scroll fragments thought to be blank" is much easier to read.
Material versus efficient cause. The scrolls are the material cause of the revelation, the researchers are the efficient cause of the revelation. Both reveal the text.
"Narrow Road Don't Overtake Cyclists"
"Narrow Road Don't Overtake, Cyclists"
If you are a library connoisseur, there are also Chatham’s (one of the oldest libraries in the land, and likely the oldest dedicated to music), the Pantheon-inspired Central Library, and the elusive (and exclusive) Portico. The Law Library was pretty striking too but sadly they moved and the original building was sold.
And a longer piece about a forged first-century gospel from the same institution: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/06/museum-...
>The new findings don’t cast doubt on the 100,000 real Dead Sea Scroll fragments, most of which lie in the Shrine of the Book, part of the Israel Museum, Jerusalem. However, the report’s findings raise grave questions about the “post-2002” Dead Sea Scroll fragments, a group of some 70 snippets of biblical text that entered the antiquities market in the 2000s. Even before the new report, some scholars believed that most to all of the post-2002 fragments were modern fakes.
As a clarification to this comment, the article does not say that the fragment is a forgery; rather it says that the claims of its age were fraudulent, or at least misleading, and that the process by which it was obtained was likely criminal. (If it was stolen, I think it has been returned, since it's in the Egypt Exploration Society collection now.)
This is a different matter than the DSS fragments, which NatGeo says were created in modern times.
Turkey, for example refuses most requests for digs. It is generally understood that they don't want excessive religious historical context placed on their country as it doesn't mesh well with their current national identity.
> The discovery means that The University of Manchester is the only institution in the UK to possess authenticated textual fragments of the Dead Sea Scrolls.