A friend gave me an article from the Wall Street Journal about a computer program, Aeneas, which is being used to figure out damaged inscriptions and texts. Love the name! – a wandering method to make things known to us.
Here is the website which discusses the method, and it has a link to their paper published in Nature. The paper itself is really fascinating – one example is a piece of bronze military “diploma” with the missing passages inserted. Their discussion of the method is way beyond me, but it seems to work.
This is the abstract of their paper:
Human history is born in writing. Inscriptions are among the earliest written forms, and offer direct insights into the thought, language and history of ancient civilizations. Historians capture these insights by identifying parallels—inscriptions with shared phrasing, function or cultural setting—to enable the contextualization of texts within broader historical frameworks, and perform key tasks such as restoration and geographical or chronological attribution1. However, current digital methods are restricted to literal matches and narrow historical scopes. Here we introduce Aeneas, a generative neural network for contextualizing ancient texts. Aeneas retrieves textual and contextual parallels, leverages visual inputs, handles arbitrary-length text restoration, and advances the state of the art in key tasks. To evaluate its impact, we conduct a large study with historians using outputs from Aeneas as research starting points. The historians find the parallels retrieved by Aeneas to be useful research starting points in 90% of cases, improving their confidence in key tasks by 44%. Restoration and geographical attribution tasks yielded superior results when historians were paired with Aeneas, outperforming both humans and artificial intelligence alone. For dating, Aeneas achieved a 13-year distance from ground-truth ranges. We demonstrate Aeneas’ contribution to historical workflows through analysis of key traits in the renowned Roman inscription Res Gestae Divi Augusti, showing how integrating science and humanities can create transformative tools to assist historians and advance our understanding of the past.
By Ruth Breindel, who taught Latin, Greek, Linguistics and Mythology at Moses Brown School for 30 years.