Artificial intelligence is bringing back to life secrets that we thought were lost forever. A team of researchers takes us behind the scenes of a discovery that turns everything we thought we knew about ancient Egypt upside down.
Too fragile to be handled, too illegible for the human eye, these secret documents lay dormant in oblivion. Until today. A new artificial intelligence specializing in digital paleography has just lifted the veil on thousands of previously unpublished texts. For more than a century, thousands of fragments have lain in the reserves of the world’s greatest museums, from Oxford to Berlin. “We knew they were there, but they were physically impossible to read, often reduced to coal or clumped together in indecipherable blocks” says Brent Seales, the computer science expert at the University of Kentucky who led this research.
The real challenge of this archaeological mission was not only to read these texts, but to succeed in “putting together” the pieces of a giant puzzle scattered over time. To achieve this, artificial intelligence has deployed a veritable technological arsenal. In particular, she used multispectral imaging to detect traces of ink completely invisible to the naked eye on carbonized or erased media.
Once the signs were revealed, she acted as an instant translator capable of deciphering the Egyptian scriptures of the time at a speed far exceeding that of the world’s leading experts. Finally, thanks to its infinite memory, the AI was able to compare and cross-reference 42,000 fragments in just a few seconds, instantly identifying the pieces that complement each other to reconstruct entire documents, which had remained broken for millennia. This ability of AI to spot what escapes humans is reminiscent of another recent feat: the discovery of hundreds of new geoglyphs in Peru, finally lifting the veil on the mystery of the Nazca Lines.
These documents were not just texts from pharaohs. They are extremely precious witnesses to the daily life of Egyptians. Thousands of love letters, break-ups and private correspondence have been found and show that the expression of feelings has not changed in 3,000 years. “Reading these fragments is a bit like coming across the WhatsApp feed or text messages of an inhabitant from 3,000 years ago.often summarizes the community of papyrologists who work with AI. On shopping lists and official letters, researchers were able to discover the price of grain and complaints against the tax administration of the time. There were even horoscopes and invitation cards. Finally, many recipes for forgotten potions and medical remedies to cure headaches or scorpion bites have been revealed.
These kinds of discoveries are the result of international collaborations. For example, the University of Oxford maintains the largest collection of papyri in the world, including that of Oxyrhynchus. But also computer engineers from the University of Kentucky associated with Egyptologists from the CNRS or museums like that of Berlin or Cairo.
