AI & Archaeology · c. 1500 BC · Hittite tablets of ancient Anatolia, Central Anatolia, Turkey
AI cuts Hittite cuneiform handwriting comparisons from three days to five minutes
Palaeographicum, built by teams in Würzburg, Mainz and Dortmund, searches 70,000 photographs of 3,500-year-old tablets for cuneiform signs written the same way.
Official announcement
Hittite tablets of ancient Anatolia, Turkey Researchers in Germany have released an artificial intelligence tool that compares the handwriting of Hittite scribes on clay tablets from ancient Anatolia. The tablets were written around 3,500 years ago. The tool, called Palaeographicum, finds cuneiform signs written in the same or a similar way across a large photo archive.
The team says a comparison that took specialists three days now takes five minutes. The tool comes from the University of Würzburg and the Academy of Sciences and Literature in Mainz. They built it with the Technical University of Dortmund.
Matching signs across five million examples
Cuneiform is a script of wedge-shaped marks pressed with a stylus into wet clay. The Hittites, who lived in what is now Turkey, used at least 375 cuneiform signs. Each sign stands for a syllable or a whole word.
Most of the tablets broke over time. Their fragments are now scattered in museums around the world. Specialists must fit the pieces back together before they can read complete texts.
Palaeographicum works on the digitised photographs in the Hittitology Portal of Mainz. The AI recognises the individual shape of a sign. It then searches the whole collection for signs written the same way or similarly. It cuts these signs out of the photos and sets them side by side in image tables.
The current version covers 70,000 photographs showing more than five million signs. The portal itself records the 30,000 known fragments of Hittite tablets. Gernot Wilhelm and Gerfrid Müller created it 25 years ago, from an inventory first compiled by Silvin Košak. It is free to use online.
Scribes left personal habits in the clay. Some pulled the stylus out so hard that the wedges ended in ornamental flourishes. Others spaced their signs in a characteristic way. Spotting these habits helps researchers decide which fragments belong to the same tablet.
At first glance, we can usually only do it slowly and with difficulty.
Gerfrid Müller, professor of Ancient Near Eastern Studies
The problem is that cuneiform is three-dimensional. Depending on the angle of the light, signs are more or less legible in a photograph.
The ‘Palaeographicum’ is radically changing our work; it allows us to save thousands of hours.
Daniel Schwemer, director of the Department of Ancient Near Eastern Studies, University of Würzburg
Schwemer gives an example. Comparing one sign as written on five different fragments used to take three days. With the tool it takes five minutes.
Hittite tablets never carry dates. Because writing changed over the centuries, sign shapes also help researchers date fragments. The tool's name refers to palaeography, the study of how old handwriting developed.
Scribes cannot yet be named automatically
The model grew out of the CuKa project (computer-assisted cuneiform analysis), funded by the German Research Foundation from 2018 to 2023. Müller developed it with the Technical University of Dortmund. There, Christopher Rest and Eugen Rusakov led the work on the model.
A philologist checked the AI during training. Turna Somel of the Mainz Academy annotated the training material and evaluated the results. The announcement gives no figures for how often the tool returns a wrong match. It cites no scientific paper.
The project's web demonstrator was too heavy to process all the available photographs. Müller, Rest and Herbert Baier Saip of Würzburg's Center for Philology and Digitality rebuilt it as the first version of Palaeographicum. Work continues. "We continuously retrain the AI," Müller says.
For now the tool finds similar signs. The team's long-term goal is software that recognises each scribe's handwriting automatically. That is hard partly because one scribe could write in different styles.
A scribe might write calmly at home. The same person might draft a hurried report during an inspection, for example on visits to sanctuaries of the Hittite Empire.
If it works, Schwemer says, the team "could obtain a clearer picture of what each scribe produced throughout their career". He says they could then compile a social history of Hittite written culture.
Sources
Spotted a mistake? Tell the editor about a spelling error or a fact that is wrong. We correct stories openly.
Readers' picks show on the front page.
Follow @AncientHeraldHQ on X for the day's finds as they come in.
Comments
House rules. Stay on the subject, be kind to other readers and say where your facts come from. No advertising and no personal attacks. The editor reads along and hides comments that break these rules.
Loading comments…