Solving Ancient Puzzles
By: Isabelle Marthot Santaniello
Tags: Digital Humanities, Ancient History, Algorithms, Open Access, Science Communication

Solving Ancient Puzzles

How technology can help to reconstruct age-old manuscripts

The Papyrus Collection of the University of Basel holds a small fragment that appears insignificant at first sight: It fits the palm of a hand and only bears the first or two words of a dozen lines. The initial editor of the collection, Professor Ernst Rabel, did not consider it important enough to include it in the volume he published in 1917 and, thus, the fragment remained unnoticed — until very recently.

Ever since digital technologies have been introduced to the Humanities, the work of papyrologists has changed quite a bit. Take for instance the international database papyri.info, which contains the texts of all papyri that have already been published. In the case of the Basel fragment, it took only a few keyword searches to find out that it is part of a much larger papyrus housed in the collection of the British Library in London.

And just as in a jigsaw puzzle, once the fragment was put back in its place, the text was legible again. After all, the document is a land lease — but not the type so commonly known from Late Antique Egypt. Here, the tenant is the father of the landlord, which is quite unusual; and both men are known to us from other sources, a dozen of papyri that have survived from this family of soldiers who lived in the city of Hermopolis in the 6th century CE — a family and a society that the Basel fragment now helps to better understand.

A new approach to search ancient sources

Like the Basel artifact, most of the ancient papyri reach out to us by fragments. There are tens of thousands scattered in collections around the world. To piece them back together by means of a word search is only possible when the text contains rare proper names or uses recognized terms like the lease mentioned above. Other than that, the field of papyrology has been relying on experts with a sharp “paleographic eye,” combining an immense visual memory with an ability to recognize unique patterns in handwriting. And yet, even the most recognized experts will admit that sometimes a little bit of luck is required!

The author viewing an ancient document in Strasbourg’s collection

But what if, instead of keywords, we could systematically look for shapes of letters, for similar handwriting patterns in all the papyri around the world? Imagine, a machine could be trained to develop a “paleographic eye.” In fact, that`s what new computational methods allow us to do and, in a nutshell, the goal of my Ambizione project called D-scribes, which is funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation.

Together with a computer scientist and several research assistants, I am building a program that recognizes fragments with very similar handwriting, potentially written by the same person. The challenges in developing such a program are many. For example, how to isolate the handwriting from a yellow-brownish background with holes, stains, and breaks? This is task much more complicated than even analyzing medieval parchment. Or, how to prove that the same person has written two texts, which, even in nowadays forensics, is far from being straightforward!

Digital Paleography