Piecing together the stories of ancient civilizations has always required painstaking detective work from historians. Today, artificial intelligence is tipping the scales, Aeneas - Google DeepMind’s innovative AI model, is streamlining the restoration and analysis of Roman-era inscriptions, breathing new life into lost voices from the past.
Solving the Puzzle of Fragmented Texts
Ancient inscriptions are invaluable, revealing everyday life, legal systems, and political shifts. Unfortunately, centuries of weathering have left many texts incomplete. Traditionally, historians search for “parallels”, similar inscriptions that offer interpretive clues, but this manual process is slow and exhaustive.
Aeneas accelerates this work, scanning thousands of Latin inscriptions in seconds to find textual and contextual matches. This leap in speed and accuracy empowers researchers to reconstruct and understand ambiguous fragments far more effectively than ever before.
Key Capabilities of Aeneas
- Parallels Search: Each inscription is encoded as a historical "fingerprint," enabling smart, deep searches for related texts across immense datasets.
- Multimodal Input: Aeneas processes both textual and visual data, enhancing its ability to pinpoint an inscription’s geographical and historical context.
- Restoration of Unknown Gaps: Unlike earlier tools, Aeneas can fill in missing text even when the gap’s length is unknown, dramatically improving restoration outcomes.
- State-of-the-Art Performance: The model leads in restoring, dating, and attributing inscriptions, setting new standards in digital humanities.
How Technology Drives Discovery
The backbone of Aeneas is a multimodal generative neural network. Drawing from the Latin Epigraphic Dataset (over 176,000 inscriptions) Aeneas uses transformer architecture to embed and rank linguistic and contextual features. This approach delivers highly relevant parallels and a nuanced understanding of each inscription’s background.
The model’s ability to handle both images and text means it supports historians with a richer, more comprehensive set of data, making connections that previously may have been missed.
Robust Results and Real-World Applications
Aeneas stands out for its precision. It restores gaps of up to ten characters with a Top-20 accuracy of 73%. Even when faced with unknown gap lengths, its accuracy remains strong at 58%. The model also excels in placing texts within their correct historical periods and geographic regions.
For example, when analyzing the Res Gestae Divi Augusti, Aeneas surfaced a sophisticated range of possible dates and highlighted relevant parallels, reinforcing scholarly debates and enhancing the depth of historical analysis.
AI and Historians: A Collaborative Future
Collaborative studies show that historians using Aeneas’ predictions and contextual data restore and date inscriptions more confidently and discover new connections. Many researchers reported that the AI’s ability to identify subtle details transformed their understanding of certain texts.
“Aeneas’ parallels completely changed my perception of the inscription. It noticed details that made all the difference for restoring and chronologically attributing the text.”
— Anonymized historian from the study
Expanding Access and Next Steps
Aeneas is openly accessible to academics, educators, and museum professionals at predictingthepast.com, with both the code and dataset available for further research. Its integration into existing workflows encourages seamless collaboration between AI and human expertise.
The Ithaca model for Greek inscriptions is also being upgraded with Aeneas’ advanced features. An updated teaching syllabus helps educators bridge technology and history, supporting global AI literacy initiatives.
The Future of Historical Research
With Aeneas, historians gain a powerful ally in uncovering the stories of the ancient world. This fusion of expert insight and AI-driven analysis marks a bold step forward for digital humanities, promising faster discoveries and a deeper understanding of our shared heritage.
Aeneas: The AI Model Transforming Ancient Inscriptions Research