Journal article
Contextualizing ancient texts with generative neural networks
- Abstract:
- Human history is born in writing. Inscriptions are among the earliest written forms, and offer direct insights into the thought, language and history of ancient civilizations. Historians capture these insights by identifying parallels—inscriptions with shared phrasing, function or cultural setting—to enable the contextualization of texts within broader historical frameworks, and perform key tasks such as restoration and geographical or chronological attribution. However, current digital methods are restricted to literal matches and narrow historical scopes. Here we introduce Aeneas, a generative neural network for contextualizing ancient texts. Aeneas retrieves textual and contextual parallels, leverages visual inputs, handles arbitrary-length text restoration, and advances the state of the art in key tasks. To evaluate its impact, we conduct a large study with historians using outputs from Aeneas as research starting points. The historians find the parallels retrieved by Aeneas to be useful research starting points in 90% of cases, improving their confidence in key tasks by 44%. Restoration and geographical attribution tasks yielded superior results when historians were paired with Aeneas, outperforming both humans and artificial intelligence alone. For dating, Aeneas achieved a 13-year distance from ground-truth ranges. We demonstrate Aeneas’ contribution to historical workflows through analysis of key traits in the renowned Roman inscription Res Gestae Divi Augusti, showing how integrating science and humanities can create transformative tools to assist historians and advance our understanding of the past.
- Publication status:
- Published
- Peer review status:
- Peer reviewed
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(Preview, Version of record, pdf, 10.5MB, Terms of use)
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- Publisher copy:
- 10.1038/s41586-025-09292-5
Authors
- Publisher:
- Springer Nature
- Journal:
- Nature More from this journal
- Volume:
- 645
- Issue:
- 8079
- Pages:
- 141–147
- Publication date:
- 2025-07-23
- Acceptance date:
- 2025-06-16
- DOI:
- EISSN:
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1476-4687
- ISSN:
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0028-0836
- Language:
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English
- Pubs id:
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2248696
- Local pid:
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pubs:2248696
- Deposit date:
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2025-07-24
- ARK identifier:
Terms of use
- Copyright holder:
- Assael et al.
- Copyright date:
- 2025
- Rights statement:
- © The Author(s) 2025. Open Access. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons AttributionNonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License, which permits any non-commercial use, sharing, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if you modified the licensed material. You do not have permission under this licence to share adapted material derived from this article or parts of it. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder.
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