How AI could help unlock ancient secrets

Like your Netflix password, the secrets hidden in ancient scrolls don't do much good if they're lost to memory.

Thankfully, a new AI chatbot is helping scholars decipher fragments of ancient Greek on tattered papyrus, potentially revealing long-lost historical details — without the need for an oracle — per Wired.

It's all Greek to me

While most AI discussions focus on the future, researchers from the Austrian Academy of Sciences are, like, totally stuck in the past. Together with the French AI lab Mistral and tech services firm Sail Reply, the group developed “The world’s first advanced large language model for ancient Greek.”

Known as Apollo — after the Greek god of light, music, and archery (save that for trivia night) — the model is designed to help scholars more quickly identify tattered and torn papyrus fragments and fill in missing words and phrases.

It's kinda like a 2.5k-year-old Mad Libs — only you don't have to stifle your laughs in the backseat when your sibling suggests something wildly inappropriate.

Free for academics, Apollo can save countless hours of intricate, tedious work and help decipher 1m+ unread Greek papyri.

• Trained on 600m historical Greek words from manuscripts, papyri, and inscriptions.
• Identifies word gaps (no spacebar in ancient Greek!), dates documents, considers historical context, and consults relevant reference material.
• Suggests the most statistically likely word or passage.
• Researchers can select from multiple options — ensuring a human element for better accuracy.

The developers hope Apollo can help reveal undiscovered details and insights into ancient Greece, and potentially be used for other ancient languages and scholarly pursuits — though probably not for Mad Libs.

(Interestingly, the current AI writing debate echoes one of ancient Greece.)

Putting the AI in antiquity

AI is already helping to decipher other ancient secrets:

• Mapping 250k square miles of the Arabian Desert to find new archeological sites.
• Identifying hundreds of mysterious giant geoglyphs in Peru.
• Decoding rolled, carbonized scrolls that survived the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius in 79 AD.
• Locating one of the world's oldest campfires.
• Recreated a 3D model of a centuries-old Indonesian relief — from a 134-year-old photo.
• Fragmentarium is helping decipher the Epic of Gilgamesh and other ancient cuneiform texts.
• The Aeneas system helps interpret ancient Latin inscriptions.

Impressive stuff. Now, if only they could help me remember my Netflix password.