With artificial intelligence (AI) as an essential tool, San Diego State University researchers have discovered surprising similarities among ancient writing systems from Africa and the Caucasus region of Eurasia. Their study suggests that the Armenian alphabet may be more closely related in structure to the ancient Ethiopic writing system than linguists and historians previously thought. The paper is published in the journal Digital Scholarship in the Humanities.
For many years, historians noticed some Armenian, Georgian and Caucasian Albanian letters look similar to letters from Ethiopic, also known as Ge’ez, a writing system developed in the Horn of Africa more than 1,600 years ago.
Most of these early studies, however, relied on scholars’ own visual inspection of the letters to determine whether they appeared alike.
Researchers from the Department of Mechanical Engineering in the College of Engineering tested this idea using AI instead of human judgment. They trained a computer program to study more than 28,000 images of Ethiopic characters so it could learn the basic shapes and patterns in the writing system. The program learned to recognize curves, straight lines, angles and the overall structure of each letter.
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