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.

The scroll dates to between 1155 and 1225, making it the oldest complete Torah scroll on record.

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.

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.  National Geographic spoke by telephone to Perani about his rediscovery.

In 2012, a colleague and I decided to write a new catalog of the