Historians have long clashed over when “Res Gestae Divi Augusti,” a monumental Latin text, was first etched in stone. The first-person inscription gave a lengthy account of the life and accomplishments of Rome’s first emperor. But was it written before or after Augustus, at age 75, died in A.D. 14? Some experts have put its origin as decades earlier.

Known in English as “Deeds of the Divine Augustus,” the text is an early example of autocratic image-burnishing. The precise date of its public debut is seen as important by historians because the emperor’s reign marked the transition of Rome from a republic to a dictatorship that lasted centuries.

Artificial intelligence is now weighing in. A model written by DeepMind, a Google company based in London, cites a wealth of evidence to claim that the text originated around A.D. 15, or shortly after Augustus’s death.

A report on the new A.I. model appeared in the journal Nature on Wednesday. It makes the case that the computer program can more generally help historians link isolated bits and pieces of past information to their socially complicated settings, helping scholars create the detailed narratives and story lines known as history.

The study’s authors call the process contextualization. The new A.I. model, known as Aeneas, after a hero of Greco-Roman mythology, specializes in identifying the social context of Latin inscriptions.

“Studying history through inscriptions is like solving a gigantic jigsaw puzzle,” Thea Sommerschield, one of the researchers, told reporters Monday in a DeepMind news briefing. A single isolated piece, she added, no matter how detailed its description, cannot help historians solve the overall puzzle of how, when and where it fits into a social context.