AI HELPS LATIN SCHOLARS DECIPHER ANCIENT ROMAN TEXTS

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.

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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.

Inscriptions in Latin were commonplace across the Roman world, from laying out the decrees of emperors to graffiti on the 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 firsthand evidence of ancient thought, language, society and history”, said study coauthor Yannis Assael, a researcher at Google’s Al 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.