The New AI Digital Scribes

How Artificial Intelligence is Revolutionizing the Study of Ancient Texts

The marriage of AI and ancient text analysis addresses one of humanity's most persistent scholarly challenges: how to recover and understand the vast majority of historical writings that remain untranslated, damaged, or completely inaccessible. For every ancient text that scholars can read today, dozens more remain locked away—some by the sheer volume of material, others by damage from time and disaster, and still others by the complexity of extinct languages and writing systems.

The numbers are staggering. Archaeologists estimate that fewer than 5% of all cuneiform tablets—humanity's earliest written records—have been fully translated. The British Museum alone holds over 130,000 cuneiform tablets, most gathering dust in storage because there simply aren't enough experts to read them.

Meanwhile, countless Greek and Latin inscriptions remain partially legible due to damage, and entire libraries of ancient texts exist only as fragments scattered across the world's museums and universities.