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.
Textual databases enable precise linguistic comparisons and the study of chronological developments of languages in the geographic space and help safeguard endangered world heritage. In this article, we describe an ongoing study of planning and designing a catalogue of 400 Phoenician‑Punic inscriptions and examine strategies of catalogue standardization and implementation, tagging and annotation systems, digital sustainability and cost‑effectiveness. The database will be searchable (of metadata and textual data), linked, and open on the network.
The article presents the epigraphic databases developed by the Ausonius Institute, highlighting the importance of integrating epigraphy with digital humanities. The flagship project, PETRAE , initiated in the 1980s, combines several Latin, Greek, and Gallic epigraphic corpora encoded in EpiDoc, based on comprehensive and detailed records. Its latest evolution, PETRAE 3.0, includes an interactive web interface and 3D visualization to facilitate the study of inscriptions. Other notable projects, such as ADOPIA , which specializes in the onomastics of the Roman Iberian Peninsula, and PATRIMONIVM , dedicated to Roman imperial properties, demonstrate Ausonius’ dynamism in applying digital technologies to ancient history. The future convergence of these databases into a common platform will optimize digital scholarly editing and facilitate collaborative research.
Editing Tools for Digital Epigraphy
The Digital Archive for the Study of pre-Islamic Arabian Inscriptions (DASI, https://dasi. cnr.it/) currently provides open access to the digital editions of nearly 8800 ancient epigraphic texts from the Arabian Peninsula. After presenting an outline of DASI ecosystem through its 25-year history, this paper focuses on the recent enrichment of its data model, carried out within a pilot project of the E-RIHS infrastructure under the H2IOSC programme. The aim was to optimise DASI as an up-to-date tool for the digital critical edition of a broad spectrum of epigraphic sources from ancient Arabia, including graffiti, instrumenta inscripta, coins, and inscribed sticks, alongside ‘monumental’ inscriptions. Most of the interventions targeted the description of the visual aspect of writing and related contextual information, enhancing the digital representation of the material dimension of written heritage, which is often overlooked in philological studies. Ongoing work is targeting the FAIRification of DASI data, which has so far resulted in the sharing of an extensive bibliography of 1800 records through Zotero.
The digitisation of the overwhelming majority of ancient evidence has made possible the emergence of Big Data and their utilisation by projects which concern the actions of millions of people. SLaVEgents represents the first large-scale project combining digital humanities, big data and history from below in order to explore the agency of enslaved persons in antiquity. It is building an open-access, interlinked digital prosopography that will provide a single point of entry for the study of all ancient slaves, freedpersons and possible slaves attested between 1000 BCE-300 CE. Based on and documenting sources across multiple ancient languages, SLaVEgents will research the multiple identities of enslaved persons; the networks and communities that they created or participated in and the ways in which slave agency led to major political, social, economic and cultural changes in antiquity. This article offers an overview of the digital epigraphy of ancient slavery made possible by SLaVEgents and the surprising patterns that emerge from the collection of the evidence in regards to the distribution of manumission inscriptions, slave epitaphs and dedications, and occupational references.