Italy is to help restore the Dead Sea Scrolls, Italian Culture Minister Francesco Rutelli announced on a visit to the Israel Museum in Jerusalem Tuesday.
Rutelli said Italy was ''honoured'' to lend its know-how to preserving Jerusalem's batch of the famous Biblical scrolls, which have been slowly deteriorating since their discovery 60 years ago.
''The decision to entrust such a fundamental document to Italy bears witness to our acknowledged global expertise in conservation and restoration,'' Rutelli said.
Italy's Central Institute for Restoration and its Institute for Book Pathology will be involved in the two-year project, the minister said.
The Dead Sea scrolls consist of roughly 900 documents, including texts from the Hebrew Bible, discovered between 1947 and 1956 in eleven caves at Qumran in the West Bank.
The texts are of great religious and historical significance as they include practically the only known surviving copies of Biblical documents made before 100 AD.
They preserve evidence of considerable diversity of belief and practice within Judaism at the time of Jesus.
Many of the scrolls are now housed in the Shrine of the Book in Jerusalem.
