Ancient history relies on disciplines such as epigraphy-the study of inscribed texts known as inscriptions-for evidence of the thought, language, society and history of past civilizations
. However, ...over the centuries, many inscriptions have been damaged to the point of illegibility, transported far from their original location and their date of writing is steeped in uncertainty. Here we present Ithaca, a deep neural network for the textual restoration, geographical attribution and chronological attribution of ancient Greek inscriptions. Ithaca is designed to assist and expand the historian's workflow. The architecture of Ithaca focuses on collaboration, decision support and interpretability. While Ithaca alone achieves 62% accuracy when restoring damaged texts, the use of Ithaca by historians improved their accuracy from 25% to 72%, confirming the synergistic effect of this research tool. Ithaca can attribute inscriptions to their original location with an accuracy of 71% and can date them to less than 30 years of their ground-truth ranges, redating key texts of Classical Athens and contributing to topical debates in ancient history. This research shows how models such as Ithaca can unlock the cooperative potential between artificial intelligence and historians, transformationally impacting the way that we study and write about one of the most important periods in human history.
What does it mean to be Mennonite in the modern world? And what is the witness of a peace church that is always at risk of splintering? C. Henry Smith--son of an Amish family, erudite historian, ...urbane bank president, and pioneer of Mennonite scholarship--sought answers to these questions in the middle of the 20th century, and his answers reverberate through the church to this day.In this engaging narrative biography, historian Perry Bush chronicles Smith's childhood in an Illinois farming community, his youthful turn toward intellectual inquiry, and his confidence that Anabaptist faith and life offer gifts to the wider world. By recounting the story of one of the foremost Mennonite intellectuals, Bush surveys the storied terrain of 20th-century Mennonite identity in its selective borrowing from wider culture and its tentative embrace of progressive reforms and higher education, and growing conviction that Anabaptism served as a taproot of Western civilization. Bush argues that Smith's body of historical writing furnished a new generation of Mennonites with both an understanding of their shared past and the tools to navigate an ever-shifting present.Volume 49 in the Studies in Anabaptist and Mennonite History Series.
This collection of essays focuses on the nexus of social relations, politics, and power in France as it moved from the age of religious wars into the age of absolutism. Using a wide variety of ...historical approaches and methods, these essays offer new insights into the evolving role of early modern elites and the social, familial, and cultural influences that shaped their values and priorities.
