Artificial intelligence (AI) is usually associated with getting us to the future faster, but it can also be a powerful tool in uncovering the past. Here are 6 ways the technology is being used around the world to help us understand the past and prepare for the future. An inscription showing Algorithm helping historians restore Greek inscriptions. An AI algorithm called Ithaca is helping historians restore ancient Greek inscriptions. Researchers at British AI firm DeepMind trained the algorithm on around 60,000 ancient Greek texts from across the Mediterranean that were written between 700 BC and AD 500.

In March 2022 DeepMind, an artificial intelligence company, announced it had developed Ithaca, a deep neural network trained to restore and attribute ancient Greek inscriptions. Ancient Greek inscriptions have shaped our understanding of the Mediterranean world from 800BC to late antiquity. Inscriptions refer to text written on durable materials such as stone and pottery. Unfortunately, these materials are typically not durable enough to remain perfectly preserved for two millennia. Therefore, the epigraphic evidence of this period is often damaged by the time it is uncovered and the inscribed texts are incomplete as a result.

The possibility that artificial intelligence (AI) will automate tasks and thus destroy certain jobs is advancing steadily into more and more areas of life; the waves are now lapping even on the quiet shores of ancient-world studies. In a paper in Nature, Assael et al.1 present an AI tool called Ithaca, which has been developed to bring deep learning to the world of classical studies and the interpretation of transcribed ancient Greek texts, which were originally inscribed on stone. But this advance should not be interpreted as a threat to centuries of tradition -- rather as a complement to them.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is expected to revolutionize the world in the coming decades. An example of this comes from Google's AI research division (DeepMind) which has used the technology to decipher broken and fragmentary ancient Greek texts. The DeepMind project has proven that it is superior to humans when it comes to understanding and deciphering ancient texts that have puzzled researchers for years. Google's artificial intelligence (AI) research arm, DeepMind, and the University of Oxford conducted a project that involved the analysis of Greek inscriptions . Many of them date back millennia and they are often broken and missing letters.

Epigraphy, the study of written matter recorded on hard or durable material, which -as a term- is derived from the Classical Greek epigraphein ("to write upon, incise") and epigraphē ("inscription"), is a prime tool in recovering much of the firsthand record of antiquity and thus, an essential adjunct of the study of ancient peoples. However, inscriptions –as records of ancient cultural heritage- are often incomplete due to deliberate destruction, or erosion and fragmentation over the centuries. Illegible parts of the text must then be restored by specialists, known as epigraphists. However one of the problems with discerning meaning from incomplete fragments of text is that there are often multiple possible solutions. Now, researchers at Oxford University - a Greek, Yannis Assael, among them- and Google's DeepMind -a London-based Artificial Intelligence (AI) company- have created Pythia. Bringing together the disciplines of ancient history and deep learning, AI Pythia -which takes its name from the woman who delivered the god Apollo's oracular responses at the Greek sanctuary of Delphi- is the first ancient text restoration model aiming to recover missing characters from a damaged text input using deep neural networks.