Google DeepMind can translate ancient texts thanks to new Aeneas model

In ancient Rome, writing was everywhere, from imperial monuments to everyday objects. But only fragments have survived to this day: many texts have been damaged by time or deliberately destroyed. To help historians reconstruct them, the Google DeepMind team developed Aeneas, an open AI model that can reconstruct Latin inscriptions, determine their age and likely place of origin.

Aeneas works not only with text, but also with context — which is critical in epigraphy. Historians usually look for parallels manually: comparing wording, grammatical constructions and typical phrases to roughly date and interpret a find. Aeneas does this automatically, processing tens of thousands of Latin texts in seconds.

The development was carried out in collaboration with the University of Nottingham with the participation of researchers from Oxford, Warwick and Athens. The model is trained on a specially created dataset LED (Latin Epigraphic Dataset), which includes more than 176,000 inscriptions collected and organized by historians over the decades. The inscriptions are cleaned, unified and provided with metadata: place of discovery, estimated date and context.

Technically, Aeneas uses a transformer architecture. One module analyzes the text, others restore lost symbols and calculate time and geographical parameters. Images indicating the physical origin of the artifact can be used as additional input.

In addition to reconstruction, the model offers a list of the most similar inscriptions – a kind of “contextual affinity”. The system creates a “vector profile” of the text, which takes into account the theme, style, period, origin and similarity with other sources.

The tool is now available online for historians, teachers, students, and museum professionals at predictingthepast.com.

According to the developers, Aeneas shows advanced results and could become a new standard in digital epigraphy, and in the future, adapt to other ancient languages and media, from papyri to coins.