PapyRow: A Dataset of Row Images from Ancient Greek Papyri for Writers Identification

Papyrology is the discipline that studies texts written on ancient papyri. An important problem faced by papyrologists and, in general by paleographers, is to identify the writers, also known as scribes, who contributed to the drawing up of a manuscript. Traditionally, paleographers perform qualitative evaluations to distinguish the writers, and in recent years, these techniques have been combined with computer-based tools to automatically measure quantities such as height and width of letters, distances between characters, inclination angles, number and types of abbreviations, etc. Recently-emerged approaches in digital paleography combine powerful machine learning algorithms with high-quality digital images. Some of these approaches have been used for feature extraction, other to classify writers with machine learning algorithms or deep learning systems. However, traditional techniques require a preliminary feature engineering step that involves an expert in the field. For this reason, publishing a well-labeled dataset is always a challenge and a stimulus for the academic world as researchers can test their methods and then compare their results from the same starting point. In this paper, we propose a new dataset of handwriting on papyri for the task of writer identification. This dataset is derived directly from GRK-Papyri dataset and the samples are obtained with some enhancement image operation. This paper presents not only the details of the dataset but also the operation of resizing, rotation, background smoothing, and rows segmentation in order to overcome the difficulties posed by the image degradation of this dataset. It is prepared and made freely available for non-commercial research along with their confirmed ground-truth information related to the task of writer identification

Approaches Used to Recognise and Decipher Ancient Inscriptions: A Review

Inscriptions play a vital role in historical studies. In order to boost tourism and academic necessities, archaeological experts, epigraphers and researchers recognised and deciphered a great number of inscriptions using numerous approaches. Due to the technological revolution and inefficiencies of manual methods, humans tend to use automated systems. Hence, computational archaeology plays an important role in the current era. Even though different types of research are conducted in this domain, it still poses a big challenge and needs more accurate and efficient methods. This paper presents a review of manual and computational approaches used to recognise and decipher ancient inscriptions.Keywords: ancient inscriptions, computational archaeology, decipher, script

Artificial intelligence based writer identification generates new evidence for the unknown scribes of the Dead Sea Scrolls exemplified by the Great Isaiah Scroll (1QIsaa)

The Dead Sea Scrolls are tangible evidence of the Bible's ancient scribal culture. This study takes an innovative approach to palaeography-the study of ancient handwriting-as a new entry point to access this scribal culture. One of the problems of palaeography is to determine writer identity or difference when the writing style is near uniform. This is exemplified by the Great Isaiah Scroll (1QIsaa). To this end, we use pattern recognition and artificial intelligence techniques to innovate the palaeography of the scrolls and to pioneer the microlevel of individual scribes to open access to the Bible's ancient scribal culture. We report new evidence for a breaking point in the series of columns in this scroll. Without prior assumption of writer identity, based on point clouds of the reduced-dimensionality feature-space, we found that columns from the first and second halves of the manuscript ended up in two distinct zones of such scatter plots, notably for a range of digital palaeography tools, each addressing very different featural aspects of the script samples. In a secondary, independent, analysis, now assuming writer difference and using yet another independent feature method and several different types of statistical testing, a switching point was found in the column series. A clear phase transition is apparent in columns 27-29. We also demonstrated a difference in distance variances such that the variance is higher in the second part of the manuscript. Given the statistically significant differences between the two halves, a tertiary, post-hoc analysis was performed using visual inspection of character heatmaps and of the most discriminative Fraglet sets in the script. Demonstrating that two main scribes, each showing different writing patterns, were responsible for the Great Isaiah Scroll, this study sheds new light on the Bible's ancient scribal culture by providing new, tangible evidence that ancient biblical texts were not copied by a single scribe only but that multiple scribes, while carefully mirroring another scribe's writing style, could closely collaborate on one particular manuscript

Advanced Techniques for the Decipherment of Ancient Scripts

This contribution explores modern and traditional approaches to the decipherment of ancient writing systems. It surveys methods used by paleographers and epigraphers and state-of-the art applications of computational linguistics, such as models based on neural networks. It frames the contextual problems scholars encounter in dealing with ancient codes, the situations and preconditions of the unknown codes, their idiosyncrasies and peculiarities, and the potential solutions afforded by both traditional and novel methods of investigation

Parental Gifts: Father-Son Dedications and Dialogues in Roman Didactic Literature

published or submitted for publicatio

Preprocessing Greek Papyri for Linguistic Annotation

Greek documentary papyri form an important direct source for Ancient Greek. It has been exploited surprisingly little in Greek linguistics due to a lack of good tools for searching linguistic structures. This article presents a new tool and digital platform, “Sematia”, which enables transforming the digital texts available in TEI EpiDoc XML format to a format which can be morphologically and syntactically annotated (treebanked), and where the user can add new metadata concerning the text type, writer and handwriting of each act of writing. An important aspect in this process is to take into account the original surviving writing vs. the standardization of language and supplements made by the editors. This is performed by creating two different layers of the same text. The platform is in its early development phase. Ongoing and future developments, such as tagging linguistic variation phenomena as well as queries performed within Sematia, are discussed at the end of the article.Peer reviewe

Writers and writing in the Roman Army at Dura-Europos

This socio-palaeographic thesis maintains that behind the uniform appearance of Roman army writing was a particular, dedicated training. Focussing on the third century Dura-Europos, it uncovers evidence for the thorough schooling given to the clerks of the resident Cohors XX Palmyrenorum enabling them to fulfil their administrative duties. These include maintaining efficient documentation systems and preparing a range of accurate, legible texts, and the clerks were trained to produce a repertoire of standard military scripts. Additionally other soldiers and the more general public were taught to read and to understand, to varying degrees, but the clerks, distinct, were specialist writers who found dignity in the work that they did. This dissertation, a preliminary study, draws throughout from the camp’s rich epigraphic and papyrological evidence. It sets out the context in which clerical soldiers worked and the evidence for army literate education and then introduces Roman writing, its form and development generally, before analysing in detail the letter-forms used in one particular standard hand over the decades the cohort’s documents span. In this hand, the well-known development out of Old Roman Cursive is presented and discussed. A brief additional chapter presents the possibility that military clerks also produced camp signage