A collaborative project involving AI researchers and Sanskritists has successfully reconstructed 8th-century Siddham script palimpsests found in the Nara Archives of Japan. Published in Science Advances, the study identifies lost Indian mathematical theorems concerning non-linear fluid statics. These texts detail the pressure distributions in large-scale reservoir systems and are believed to have originated from the Kanchi region of South India before traveling along the Silk Road.
The AI models were able to separate the faded Sanskrit layers from later medieval Japanese annotations, uncovering diagrams that model hydrostatic equilibrium using early trigonometric identities. This finding suggests that Indian civil engineering was underpinned by a formal mathematical framework for fluid mechanics that influenced architectural practices across East Asia during the Tang and Nara periods.