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Natural language modeling is used to predict or generate the next word or character of modern languages. Furthermore, statistical character-based language models have been found useful in authorship attribution analyses by studying the linguistic proximity of excerpts unknown to the model. In prior work, we modeled Homeric language and provided empirical findings regarding the authorship nature of the 48 Iliad and Odyssey books. Following this line of work, and considering the current philological views and trends, we break down the two poems further into smaller portions. By employing language modeling we identify outlying passages, indicating reduced linguistic affinity with the main body of the two works and, by extension, potentially different authorship. Our results show that some of the passages isolated as outliers by the language models were also identified as such by human researchers. We further test our methodology and models on texts of similar language and genre created by other authors, namely Hesiod’s “Theogony” and “Work and Days”.

Dating papyri accurately is crucial not only to editing their texts, but also for our understanding of palaeography and the history of writing, ancient scholarship, material culture, networks in antiquity, etc. Most ancient manuscripts offer little evidence regarding the time of their production, forcing papyrologists to date them on palaeographical grounds, a method often criticized for its subjectivity. By experimenting with data obtained from the Collaborative Database of Dateable Greek Bookhands and the PapPal online collections of objectively dated Greek papyri, this study shows that deep learning dating models, pre-trained on generic images, can achieve accurate chronological estimates for a test subset (67.97% accuracy for bookhands and 55.25% for documents). To compare the estimates of these models with those of humans, experts were asked to complete a questionnaire with samples of literary and documentary hands that had to be sorted chronologically by century. The same samples were dated by the models in question. The results are presented and analysed.

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