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A new AI tool has the potential to turbocharge our understanding of all human history, researchers say.
Artificial intelligence has already been used to fill in gaps in ancient Roman scrolls, but a new system goes much further.
It can fill in missing words from ancient Roman inscriptions carved on monuments and everyday objects, as well as dating and placing them geographically.
AI often introduces errors in its analysis of even simple modern texts, so there are concerns that relying too much on this technology might distort rather than enhance our understanding of history.
But historian Prof Dame Mary Beard of Cambridge University has described the technology as potentially “transformative” to our study of past events.
She said that the system, called Aeneas, after a Greek and Roman mythological figure, could accelerate the rate at which historians piece together the past from ancient texts.
“Breakthroughs in this very difficult field have tended to rely on the memory, the subjective judgement and the hunch/guesswork of individual scholars, supported by traditional, encyclopaedic databases. Aeneas opens up entirely new horizons.”
Ancient inscriptions are usually incomplete, of unknown origin and date, and often all three. Historians and classicists attempt to fill in the blanks by drawing on texts that are similar in wording, grammar, appearance and cultural setting, known as ‘parallels’. Ancient inscriptions tend to be formulaic so historians can often infer what the missing part of a sentence goes on to say.
The process is painstaking
