Research Aeneas transforms how historians connect the past Share
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Introducing the first model for contextualizing ancient inscriptions, designed to help historians better interpret, attribute and restore fragmentary texts. Writing was everywhere in the Roman world — etched onto everything from imperial monuments to everyday objects. From political graffiti, love poems and epitaphs to business transactions, birthday invitations and magical spells, inscriptions offer modern historians rich insights into the diversity of everyday life across the Roman world. Often, these texts are fragmentary, weathered or deliberately defaced. Restoring, dating and placing them is nearly impossible without contextual information, especially when comparing similar inscriptions. Today, we’re publishing a paper in Nature introducing Aeneas, the first artificial intelligence (AI) model for contextualizing ancient inscriptions. When working with ancient inscriptions, historians traditionally rely on their expertise and specialized resources to identify “parallels” — which are texts that share similarities in wording, syntax, standardized formulas or provenance. Aeneas greatly accelerates this complex and time-consuming work. It reasons across thousands of Latin inscriptions, retrieving textual and contextual parallels in seconds that allow historians to interpret and build upon the model’s findings.
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Our model can also be adapted to other ancient languages, scripts and media, from papyri to coinage, expanding its capabilities to help draw connections across a wider range of historical evidence. We co-developed Aeneas with the University of Nottingham, and in partnership with researchers at the Universities of Warwick, Oxford and Athens University of Economics and Business (AUEB). This work was part of a wider effort to explore how generative AI can help historians better identify and interpret parallels at scale. We want this research to benefit as many people as possible, so we’re making an interactive version of Aeneas freely-available to researchers, students, educators, museum professionals and more at predictingthepast.com. To support further research, we’re also open-sourcing our code and dataset. Aeneas’ advanced capabilities Named after the wandering hero of Graeco-Roman mythology, Aeneas builds upon Ithaca, our earlier work using AI to restore, date and place ancient Greek inscriptions. Aeneas goes a step further, helping historians interpret and contextualize a text, give meaning to isolated fragments, draw richer conclusions and piece together a better understanding of ancient history. Our model’s advanced capabilities include: Parallels search: It searches for parallels across a vast collection of Latin inscriptions. By turning each text into a kind of historical fingerprint, Aeneas identifies deep connections that can help historians situate inscriptions within their broader historical context.
It searches for parallels across a vast collection of Latin inscriptions. By turning each text into a kind of historical fingerprint, Aeneas identifies deep connections that can help historians situate inscriptions within their broader historical context. Processing multimodal input: Aeneas is the first model to determine a text's geographical provenance using multimodal inputs. It analyzes both text and visual information, like images of an inscription.
Aeneas is the first model to determine a text's geographical provenance using multimodal inputs. It analyzes both text and visual information, like images of an inscription. Restoring gaps of unknown length: For the first time, Aeneas can restore gaps in texts where the missing length is unknown. This makes it a more versatile tool for historians dealing with heavily damaged material.
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