Historians face many problems in piecing together the past from ancient inscriptions. They're usually incomplete, and also their origin and date may not be known.历史学家们在用古代铭文拼凑过往时面临许多难题。这些铭文通常残缺不全，而且它们的来源和年代也可能无从知晓。

Researchers attempt to fill in the blanks by drawing on texts that are similar in wording, grammar, and appearance. Ancient inscriptions tend to be formulaic, so historians can infer what the missing part of the sentence is saying from similar inscriptions. The process is painstaking and can take months or years.研究人员们尝试填补铭文中的空白部分，他们通过借鉴在措辞、语法和外观上类似的文本来完成这项工作。古代铭文往往具有程式化的特征，所以历史学家们可以从相似的铭文中推断出一个句子中缺失的部分所要表达的内容。这个过程是十分艰难的，可能需要数月甚至数年的时间。

Aeneas does this in the blink of an eye, by drawing from a database of 176,000 ancient Roman writings.而埃涅阿斯仅用一眨眼的功夫就能完成这项工作，它依靠的是从一个包含 17.6 万份古罗马文献的数据库中提取信息。