Dead Sea Scroll text finally decoded by archaeologists piecing tiny fragments together

Archaeologists have claimed to decode one of the last few remaining obscure parts of the Dead Sea Scrolls.

Sixty tiny fragments of the ancient text were pieced together over the course of a year and are believed to identify the name of a festival marking the changes between seasons.

It also revealed a second scribe corrected mistakes made by another author.

The fragments, which are believed to date from the 4th century BC and were written by an ancient Jewish sect, were originally believed to belong to several different scrolls.

The exact author of the scrolls has never been determined but some scholars attribute them to an ascetic desert sect called the Essenes and were discovered in a cave in Qumran in the West Bank in 1947, the BBC reported.

Eshbal Ratson and Jonathan Ben-Dov from the University of Haifa in Israel pieced together the fragments over the course of a year and found they detailed special occasions celebrated by the Jewish sect such as descriptions of festivals which formed part of their unique 364 day calendar.

Mainstream Judaism now uses the lunar calendar and the scrolls contain references to annual olive and wine festivals which are no longer celebrated by modern Jews but may be linked to the festival of Shavuot.

The findings, which were published in the Journal of Biblical Literature, give us some insight into the lives of the fanatical sect which lived in the desert and suffered persecution from the mainstream Jewish establishment.

The other scrolls, which contain Hebrew, Greek and Aramaic writings, include the earliest-known books of the Old Testament including the oldest surviving copy of the Ten Commandments.