One Thousand and One Conjectures

Data collapse from critical phenomena meets manuscript transmission: Greek works at large and Byzantine book epigrams are different genres copied under different incentives, yet their witness-count distributions should collapse onto a single curve after rescaling by the mean, because textual survival has…

Genuine Linear B tallies should be Benford-conformal; assessment records (quotas) should deviate — statistically separating what was counted from what was demanded. Falsify: digit distributions by tablet series.

Computational errors in dated horoscopes are inherited from specific copies of astronomical tables — so recomputing surviving horoscopes reconstructs the copy-tree of the tables themselves. Falsify: recompute and cluster.

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.

Generalizing the famous 190 Themistocles sherds cut by a few hands: handwriting clusters on ostraka should predict deposit location — ward-level bloc voting, measurable. Falsify: paleographic clustering plus findspots.

His distance errors should grow log-normally with informant hops from the Aegean — rumor as multiplicative noise. Falsify: reported vs true distances.

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.

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.

Greek and Roman astragalus throw scores are inversely proportional to empirically measured face probabilities — implicit odds-pricing two millennia before probability theory. Falsify: toss experiments vs attested scoring.

Recorded oracle ambiguity (countable branch interpretations) scales with the stakes and uncertainty of the question — hedged forecasting as institutional survival. Falsify: coding the Fontenrose catalog.

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…

Joins neutral models of cultural evolution to Byzantine paratexts: if book-epigram copying were preferential attachment, older epigram types would accumulate more occurrences simply by exposure; instead popularity is fixed at birth by intrinsic fit to scribal needs, and age buys almost nothing.

Joins actuarial insurance pricing to maritime archaeology: fourth-century BCE Athenian bottomry rates were risk-priced to break even, so the loss probability implied by loan spreads must match the wreck rate implied by the archaeological record, two completely independent instruments reading the same…

Lanchester's attrition laws meet ancient naval history: ramming warfare concentrates force like aimed fire, so galley battles obey the square law, while phalanx battles, fought rank against rank on a fixed frontage, obey the linear law — two regimes of the same…

Service-capacity planning meets Greek civic demography: theaters were sized to a fixed service fraction of the citizen body — a percentile capacity rule — making seat counts a fossilized census tighter than any other urban size proxy.

Joins the Byzantine book-epigram corpus to the sociology of two book markets: Gospels, lectionaries, and service books were produced in volume by professional scribes on commission, who closed a job with a ready-made verse tag, while manuscripts of ancient secular authors were…

Connects the survival statistics of Greek literature to the Byzantine school as a replication machine: a work either entered the curriculum-and-anthology circuit, recopied every generation in every provincial classroom, or it depended on sporadic scholarly interest. Two regimes of reproduction should leave…

Joins the Byzantine school selection of the tragic triads to the older stratum of anthology culture: teachers selected plays not by dramatic merit but by gnomic yield — the sentences a schoolboy could copy, memorize, and deploy — and that yield had…

Connects the work-level structure of Greek survival to how school canons actually chose: not authors but set texts. If the curriculum replicated flagship works while letting the same author's remaining output starve — Euripides select versus alphabetic, seven plays of Aeschylus out…

Byzantine pseudepigrapha should out-transmit the genuine works of the very fathers they impersonate, because forgery is demand-driven while authorship is occasion-driven. A pseudonymous homily was composed for an existing liturgical or catechetical market and was born into demand; a genuine work was…

precision in Byzantine patristic citation was armor evolved in forgery arms races, not a scholarly virtue diffusing gradually. Wherever a doctrinal fight turned on accusations of forged or truncated proof-texts — the Monothelete crisis of the 640s, the iconoclast controversy resolved at…

within a single church father's corpus, refutations of heresies that were extinct by about 800 should transmit far worse than the same author's non-polemical dogmatic and homiletic works. Copying was demand-driven, and a dead opponent generates no classroom, liturgical, or catena demand;…

conciliar florilegia were canonization machines for individual works, not authors. A patristic work excerpted in the acta of an ecumenical council acquired a permanent copying premium over its author's other works, because the acta circulated empire-wide as authoritative proof-text maps and later…

Byzantine book epigrams stratify by the industrial structure of the copying that carried them. Liturgical and biblical books were produced by professional scribes reproducing a whole book-object, paratexts included, so their epigrams are mass-replicated formulae; philosophical manuscripts were copied by and for…

In Byzantium the coin was the fastest image medium the court controlled: dies were recut within months, while mosaics, ivories, and books ran on multi-year project cycles. Innovations in imperial iconography — new crown forms, loros arrangements, newly court-adopted Christ and Virgin…

Chrysography and gold-leaf image grounds drew on the same budget line, the same material stock, and the same specialist hours, and they address different audiences — the reader and the beholder. The naive luxury model says richer books have more of both;…

Byzantine book epigrams praising gold letters, silver covers, and purple leaves are conventionally read as rhetorical topoi. But the verses were commissioned as part of the same donation package as the decoration, and a donor recording a gift before God has audit…

Donor portraiture is one genre under two theologies of presence. Latin donation imagery kept renegotiating scale as lay patronage broadened and purgatorial accounting personalized the stakes; the Byzantine proskynesis format was liturgically frozen. The handbook impression that donors get bigger is not…