For centuries, ancient lines carved in Latin on stone, pottery, tomb steles or relics from the Roman period have fallen into silence.
Over time, nature and war have made most of those documents unfinished, missing passages, cracked, and un readable.
For historians, each of the words is a valuable piece in Roman historical picture, but it is also a difficult puzzle.
Recently, an artificial intelligence tool called Aeneas, developed by Google DeepMind, is opening a completely new approach to decoding lost ancient messages.
Named after a figure in ancient Roman legend, Aeneas operated on the power of data, learning from more than 170,000 ancient Latin documents, analyzing and making predictions for the blurred, cracked, and broken places on archaeological relics.
In addition, Aeneas also helps connect researchers with other similar documents, determining the time and location of the text's appearance, thereby recreating events, characters or places that were once forgotten.
In testing, the tool can date individuals within a decade and trace the origin with an accuracy of about 75%.
The lines that were once just vague suggestions have now gradually been clarified, reflecting daily life, law, religion, commerce, and even personal messages of ancient Greeks.
The faster and more complete understanding is helping to recreate the picture of Roman history more vividly and in more detail than ever.
Although warned to be cautious when using, Aeneas is still expected to expand to other ancient languages and cultures, where history is buried under the dust of time.
In each complete sentence that AI helps recreate, a part of the memory of the Roman civilization is being aroused and is no longer a mystery.
