'Transformative': AI tool helps fill in blanks on Roman inscriptions

In addition to sanitation, medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, a freshwater system and public health, the Romans also produced a lot of inscriptions.

- Ian Sample

Making sense of the ancient texts can be a slog for scholars, but a new artificial intelligence tool from Google DeepMind aims to ease the process. Named Aeneas after the mythical Trojan hero, the program predicts where and when inscriptions were made and makes suggestions where words are missing.

Historians who put the program through its paces said it had transformed their work by helping them identify similar inscriptions to those they were studying and proposing words to fill the inevitable gaps in worn and damaged artefacts.

"Aeneas helps historians interpret, attribute and restore fragmentary Latin texts," said Dr Thea Sommerschield, a historian at the University of Nottingham who developed Aeneas with the tech firm.