One Thousand and One Conjectures

Letter-order mutations in attested abecedaria (transpositions, insertions, deletions) accumulate roughly per teaching generation along the alphabet's transmission tree.

Debasement is tolerated until a critical fineness, then old-coin hoarding jumps discontinuously — and the threshold should be roughly the same in 3rd-century Rome and 14th-century France. Falsify: old/new coin ratios in hoards vs fineness series.

Oral-epic formulas are redundancy bits: formula density should rise with local information load (names, numbers, catalogs) within Homeric and South Slavic lines. Falsify: corpus regression.

Vedic oral transmission's error rate per syllable-century is orders of magnitude below manuscript copying of comparable Sanskrit texts — quantify both for the first time. Falsify: Rigveda variant counts vs Mahābhārata manuscript variance.

Comparing Chinese, Korean, Japanese, and Arabic records of the same celestial events yields a censorship index: Chinese omissions should cluster in usurpation and legitimacy-crisis decades. Falsify: comparative event catalogs.

Its repeated-glyph statistics should match the Markov structure of recitation genealogies, not prose language. Falsify: sequence entropy against chant corpora.

Pre-modern Mediterranean harbor spacing comes in multiples of ~35 nautical miles, with a different quantum in monsoon seas. Falsify: gazetteer nearest-neighbor spectra.

The distance-decay exponent of obsidian steps down sharply when seafaring arrives — transport revolutions visible as breaks in one constant. Falsify: sourced Melos and Anatolian distributions through time.

Baltic amber finds fit an advection–diffusion equation with rivers as channels and a measurable "diffusivity" per era. Falsify: FTIR-sourced find maps.

Statue sizes follow competitive-escalation dynamics ending at a resource frontier, predicting the largest unfinished statue lies at the feasibility boundary. Falsify: size chronology plus transport energetics.

Ceramic firing temperatures decline during deforestation episodes — kilns as energy-scarcity gauges. Falsify: refiring tests vs pollen/charcoal records.

Standard dispersion (cubit rods, brick molds) tightens under strong dynasties and loosens in intermediate periods — measurement variance as a government-strength index. Falsify: museum metrology by period.

Tooth-module standards should form a measurable transmission chain from Antikythera-era Greek gearing through the Byzantine sundial-calendar to Islamic geared astrolabes. Falsify: comparative tooth metrology.

Joins capture-recapture ecology to Greek philology: works attested by exactly one and exactly two witnesses play the role of singleton and doubleton species, so the Pinakes witness-count table is an ecological sample from which the size of the lost Greek library is…

Newsvendor inventory theory meets the Chinese ever-normal granary: the changpingcang's buy-low/sell-high trigger prices implement a newsvendor critical fractile, so the width of the price band reveals the state's implied ratio of shortage cost to storage cost — a solved optimization a millennium…

Proof-of-work monetary theory meets Yapese stone money: rai stones were a difficulty-priced currency — value superlinear in size because quarrying-and-transport work scales faster than diameter — plus a verifiable-history premium for provenance stories, and an instant discount when cheap Western shipping broke…