AI Can Fill In Gaps In Our History, Starting With Ancient Rome

The study of history has always been a detective’s game. Historians piece together narratives from fragments—eroded monuments, scattered artifacts, and incomplete texts. It’s a painstaking process, often relying on educated guesses and interpretations. But now, a new player has entered the scene: artificial intelligence. Specifically, a model named Aeneas, developed by Google DeepMind, is rewriting the rules of historical research. This isn’t just about automating translation; it’s about leveraging AI’s pattern recognition to reconstruct damaged Latin texts, date inscriptions, and even pinpoint their geographical origins. The implications are staggering—this could fill significant gaps in our understanding of the Roman world and, potentially, all of human history.

The AI Detective: How Aeneas Reconstructs the Past

Aeneas isn’t just another translation tool. It’s a model trained on a massive dataset of 176,000 Roman inscriptions, allowing it to understand the nuances of Latin, common phrasing, and the contextual patterns within Roman epigraphy. This means it doesn’t just predict words—it suggests plausible completions for fragmented texts, taking into account the surrounding context and the likely purpose of the inscription. Previous AI applications in the field often focused on deciphering relatively complete texts, like those found on ancient scrolls. Aeneas, however, excels at dealing with severely damaged materials, where large portions of the text are missing.

The collaborative work between Google DeepMind and historians, such as Alison Cooley at the University of Warwick, highlights the importance of human expertise in validating and interpreting the AI’s suggestions. The model doesn’t operate in a vacuum; it functions as a powerful tool that augments the historian’s skillset, providing new avenues for investigation and accelerating the research process. The results, published in *Nature*, demonstrate the model’s ability to accurately predict missing words and offer plausible reconstructions, even in cases where human scholars have struggled for years.

Beyond Text: Dating and Localization

Aeneas’s capabilities extend beyond text reconstruction. Roman inscriptions often lack explicit dates, making it difficult to establish a precise timeline of events. Similarly, determining the origin of an inscription can be challenging, especially if it has been moved or repurposed over time. Aeneas can analyze the linguistic style, the formulaic phrases used, and the content of the inscription to estimate its date and likely place of origin. This is achieved by identifying patterns and correlations within the training data, allowing the AI to make informed predictions based on the characteristics of known inscriptions.

This capability is particularly valuable for inscriptions found outside of Italy, where establishing provenance can be especially difficult. Furthermore, the AI’s ability to analyze inscriptions from everyday objects—pottery sherds, building materials, and personal items—provides a window into the lives of ordinary Romans, a demographic often underrepresented in traditional historical sources. By analyzing these previously overlooked fragments, Aeneas can help to build a more comprehensive and nuanced picture of Roman society.

The Future of AI in the Humanities

The development of Aeneas represents a broader trend: the increasing application of AI to the humanities. While AI has long been used in scientific fields for data analysis and modeling, its potential to transform historical research is only now being fully realized. The success of Aeneas demonstrates that AI is not simply a tool for automating tasks but a powerful instrument for generating new insights and challenging existing assumptions.

However, it’s crucial to acknowledge the limitations of this technology. Aeneas is not a replacement for human historians; it is a tool that requires careful interpretation and validation. The AI’s suggestions are based on probabilities and patterns, and there is always a risk of error or misinterpretation. The best results, as researchers have found, come from a collaborative approach, where human scholars work alongside the AI, leveraging their expertise to refine the model’s output and ensure its accuracy.

Looking ahead, the principles behind Aeneas could be applied to other ancient languages and historical datasets, potentially unlocking new knowledge about civilizations across the globe. The ability to reconstruct fragmented texts and contextualize historical artifacts has the potential to revolutionize our understanding of the past, offering a more complete and nuanced picture of the human story. As AI continues to evolve, it’s clear that the detective’s game of history is about to get a whole lot more interesting.