Aeneas, the AI that deciphers damaged Latin inscriptions

On July 23, Google unveiled its new artificial intelligence (AI) tool, developed through a collaboration between its dedicated artificial intelligence (AI) company, DeepMind, and a team of historians, to complete and time-sequence damaged Latin inscriptions or those with missing words.

Dubbed “Aeneas” – Latin for “Aeneas,” the Trojan hero and mythical founder of Rome – the program is “a generative AI model trained on inscriptions from three of the largest databases of Latin epigraphy. These combined sources contain texts extracted from 176,861 inscriptions – as well as images from 5% of them – and cover a period extending from the ^7th century BC to the ^8th century AD.” reports the scientific publication Nature .

“The model was then tested on a famous text called Res gestae divi Augusti ['Acts of the Divine Augustus'], which details the life of the Roman emperor Augustus. The model's estimates of the inscriptions' dating were found to be similar to those of historians, and the tool was not misled by the dates mentioned in the text. It also detected spelling variations and identified other features that a historian would also use to assess the age and origin of the document,” Nature explains.

This is a tool of interest to historians, as much of the corpus of Latin texts has been severely altered by the passage of time. “Studying history through inscriptions is like trying to piece together a giant puzzle, except that it contains tens of thousands of pieces. And 90% of them are missing, because not all of them have survived the centuries to reach us,” says Thea Sommerschield of the University of Nottingham, who participated in the development of Aeneas, as quoted by New Scientist magazine .

“Inscriptions are our most important source for understanding the lives and experiences of people in the Roman period. They cover a wide range of topics, including law, trade, politics and military life, religion, death, and domestic affairs,” Charlotte Tupman, a specialist in Latin epigraphy at the University of Exeter, told New Scientist .

With nearly 1,500 new Latin inscriptions being discovered each year, The Guardian points out , there is every reason to believe that the integration of AI tools into historical research will increase.

“Asking a general-purpose AI to perform analyses related to ancient history often produces unsatisfactory results,” warns Chiara Cenati of the University of Vienna. “ Therefore, the development of a tool specifically designed to assist research in Latin epigraphy is particularly welcome.” Aeneas is currently freely available online .