Aeneas transforms how historians connect the past

Summary

Research Aeneas transforms how historians connect the past Published 23 July 2025 Authors The Aeneas team Introducing the first model for contextualizing ancient inscriptions, designed to help historians better interpret, attribute and restore fragmentary texts.Writing was everywhere in the Roman world — etched onto everything from imperial monuments to everyday objects. From political graffiti, love poems and epitaphs to business transactions, birthday invitations and magical spells, inscriptions offer modern historians rich insights into the diversity of everyday life across the Roman world.Often, these texts are fragmentary, weathered or deliberately defaced. Restoring, dating and placing them is nearly impossible without contextual information, especially when comparing similar inscriptions.Today, we’re publishing a paper in Nature introducing Aeneas, the first artificial intelligence (AI) model for contextualizing ancient inscriptions.When working with ancient inscriptions, historians traditionally rely on their expertise and specialized resources to identify “parallels” — which are texts that share similarities in wording, syntax, standardized formulas or provenance.Aeneas greatly accelerates this complex and time-consuming work. It reasons across thousands of Latin inscriptions, retrieving textual and contextual parallels in seconds that allow historians to interpret and build upon the model’s findings. Our model can also be adapted to other ancient languages, scripts and media, from papyri to coinage, expanding its capabilities to help draw connections across a wider range of historical evidence.We co-developed Aeneas with the University of Nottingham, and in partnership with researchers at the Universities of Warwick, Oxford and Athens University of Economics and Business (AUEB). This work was part of a wider effort to explore how generative AI can help historians better identify and interpret parallels at scale.We want this research to benefit as many peop...