One Thousand and One Conjectures

Currency unions are supposed to be a modern invention, and low variance in the unit of account is their hallmark: struck coinage keeps its weight uniform because mints are policed. The trans-Saharan trade, by contrast, ran for centuries on bars of rock…

Great Zimbabwe on its inland plateau and the Swahili port of Kilwa on the Indian Ocean coast are the two famous sites joined here, and the joint is metrological. Kilwa struck its own coins to a known weight standard and shipped the…

The Swahili stone towns of the East African coast — Kilwa above all — were built of coral rag set in lime mortar, and construction there was governed by the monsoon: the rains halt building and lime-burning, so work proceeds in an…

In asset pricing, the single-factor market model says every stock, however idiosyncratic, loads positively on one common market factor. This conjecture applies it to Eastern Christian book production: the Syriac, Armenian, Coptic, Ethiopic, Georgian and other traditions were doctrinally separated and institutionally…

Phase separation in soft-matter physics says a mixture of immiscible components does not sit stably at half-and-half: it demixes into nearly pure domains, depleting the middle of the composition spectrum. This conjecture applies that instability to monastic geography in the vHMML catalogues…

Geʽez began, like its Semitic relatives, as a consonant-only script, and then — uniquely among Semitic scripts — acquired obligatory vowel marks in the fourth century, the same generation as King Ezana's conversion to Christianity. The standard explanations invoke Christian scripture or…

The Ethiopian computus (Baḥrä ḥassab) fixes Easter through tables written in Geʽez numerals, themselves derived from Greek letters. If scribes actually recomputed the tables, copying errors would be caught and residual errors would be arithmetic — off by one within a cycle;…

Geʽez colophons date manuscripts by several concurrent eras — Year of Mercy, Year of the World, Era of the Martyrs — often stacked two or three deep. This conjecture says the choice among them was not free variation or fashion but a…

Ethiopian manuscripts teem with colophons; Sahel manuscripts are famously reticent about their makers. This conjecture says colophon density is an economic signature, not a cultural temperament: books held as institutional endowments (church property, waqf) need internal provenance records — who gave what,…

Sahel life is metered by the rains: farming in the wet months, caravans, travel, and teaching in the dry. Copying a book needs stable paper, workable ink, daylight leisure, and often a borrowed exemplar newly arrived by caravan — all dry-season goods.…

The surviving Swahili manuscript record concentrates spectacularly in a few northern localities — above all the Lamu archipelago — although pre-1500 epigraphy shows literate settlement along three thousand kilometres of coast. This conjecture claims the corpus geography is an artifact of family-archive…