PARIS (AFP) : Around 1,500 Latin inscriptions are discovered every year, offering an invaluable view into the daily life of ancient Romans – and posing a daunting challenge for the historians tasked with interpreting them.
But a new artificial intelligence tool, partly developed by Google researchers, can now help Latin scholars piece together these puzzles from the past, according to a study published on Wednesday.
Inscriptions in Latin were commonplace throughout the Roman world, from the laying out of decrees by emperors to graffiti on city streets. One mosaic outside a home in the ancient city of Pompeii even warns: “Beware of the dog.”
These inscriptions are “so precious to historians because they offer first-hand evidence of ancient thought, language, society and history,” said study co-author Yannis Assael, a researcher at Google’s AI lab DeepMind.
“What makes them unique is that they are written by the ancient people themselves across all social classes on any subject. It’s not just history written by the elite,” Assael, who co-designed the AI model, told a press conference.
However, these texts have often been damaged over the millennia.
“We usually don’t know where and when they were written,” Assael said.
The researchers then created a generative neural network, an AI tool that can be trained to identify complex relationships between different types of data.
They named their model Aeneas, after the Trojan hero and son of the Greek goddess Aphrodite.
It was trained on data about the dates, locations and meanings of Latin transcriptions from an empire that spanned 5 million square kilometers over two millennia.
Thea Sommerschield, an epigrapher at the University of Nottingham who co-designed the AI model, said that “studying history through inscriptions is like solving a gigantic jigsaw puzzle.”
“You can’t solve the puzzle with a single isolated piece, even though you know information like its color or its shape,” she explained.
“To solve the puzzle, you need to use that information to find the pieces that connect to it.”
Tested on Augustus
This can be a huge job.
Latin scholars must compare inscriptions against “potentially hundreds of parallels,” a task that “demands extraordinary erudition” and involves “laborious manual searches” through massive library and museum collections, according to the study in the journal Nature.
The researchers trained their model on 176,861 inscriptions – worth up to 16 million characters – five percent of which contained images.
It can now estimate the location of an inscription among the 62 Roman provinces, offer a decade when it was produced and even guess what missing sections might have contained, they said.
To test their model, the team asked Aeneas to analyse a famous inscription called “Res Gestae Divi Augusti,” in which Rome’s first emperor, Augustus, detailed his accomplishments.
A debate still rages among historians about when exactly the text was written.
Though the text is riddled with exaggerations, irrelevant dates and erroneous geographical references, the researchers said that Aeneas was able to use subtle clues such as archaic spelling to land on two possible dates – the two being debated between historians.
More than 20 historians who tried out the model found it provided a useful starting point in 90% of cases, according to DeepMind.
The best results were achieved when historians utilized the AI model in conjunction with their research skills, rather than relying solely on one or the other, the study found.
“Since their breakthrough, generative neural networks have seemed at odds with educational goals, with fears that relying on AI hinders critical thinking rather than enhances knowledge,” said study co-author Robbe Wulgaert, a Belgian AI researcher.
“By developing Aeneas, we demonstrate how this technology can meaningfully support the humanities by addressing concrete challenges historians face.”
