This database, alongside a few thousand images of inscriptions, makes up the training set for Aeneas’s deep neural network. There simply aren’t enough high-quality scans of inscriptions to train a language model to learn this kind of task. The Aeneas team believes it could help researchers “connect the past,” said Yannis Assael, a researcher at Google DeepMind who worked on the project. To validate the system, the team presented 23 historians with inscriptions that had been previously dated and tested their workflows both with and without Aeneas. “That was jaw-dropping,” Thea Sommerschield, an epigrapher at the University of Nottingham who also worked on Aeneas, said in the press briefing.