Machine learning techniques are giving archaeologists new tools to help them understand the past, especially when translating ancient manuscripts. The most recent example is an AI model developed by Alphabet subsidiary DeepMind that not only helps restore missing text from ancient Greek inscriptions but also suggests when the writing was written (within a 30-year span) and likely geographic origins.
“Inscriptions are really important because they are direct sources of evidence … written directly by ancient people themselves,” Thea Sommerschield, a historian and machine learning expert who helped created the model, told journalists in a press briefing.
These writings are frequently damaged due to their age, making restoration a gratifying challenge. Because they are frequently engraved on inorganic materials like as stone or metal, procedures such as radiocarbon dating cannot be used to determine when they were written.
“To solve these tasks, epigraphers look for textual and contextual parallels in similar inscriptions,” said Sommerschield, who was co-lead on the work alongside DeepMind staff research scientist Yannis Assael. “However, it’s really difficult for a human to harness all existing, relevant data and to discover underlying patterns.”
That’s where machine learning can help. The Ithaca software is trained using a dataset of 78,608 ancient Greek inscriptions, each of which is annotated with metadata identifying where and when it was written (as far as historians know). Ithaca, like any machine learning system, looks for patterns in this data, embedding it in complicated mathematical models, and then inferring text, dates, and origins from these conclusions.
These are promising statistics, but it’s important to remember that Ithaca is not capable of operating independently of human expertise. Its suggestions are ultimately based on data collected by traditional archaeological methods, and its creators are positioning it as simply another tool in a wider set of forensic methods, rather than a fully-automated AI historian. “Ithaca was designed as a complementary tool to aid historians,” said Sommerschield
