Deciphering some people’s writing can be a major challenge—especially when that writing is cuneiform characters imprinted onto 3,000-year-old tablets.

Now, Middle East scholars can use artificial intelligence (AI) to identify and copy over cuneiform characters from photos of tablets, letting them read complicated scripts with ease.

Along with Egyptian hieroglyphs, cuneiform is one of the oldest known forms of writing, and consists of more than 1,000 unique characters. The appearance of these characters can vary across eras, cultures, geography and even individual writers, making them difficult to interpret. Researchers from Cornell and Tel Aviv University (TAU) have developed an approach called ProtoSnap that “snaps” into place a prototype of a character to fit the individual variations imprinted on a tablet.