One Thousand and One Conjectures

The medieval universities of Paris and Oxford built theology by citation: a scholastic quotes Augustine, Aristotle, and a handful of peers, and modern scholars map who-read-whom by counting those citations as a contact network. Ethiopia's Geʽez commentary tradition — the patristic layers…

Capture-recapture is the ecologist's trick for counting fish you cannot see: mark some, resample, and the overlap tells you the population; book historians use the same mathematics to estimate lost medieval literature from overlapping survivals. The Maya screenfold codices suffered the most…

Hebrew manuscripts can be dated at scale because the SfarData project regressed script and codicological features against thousands of explicitly dated colophons, turning handwriting into a clock. Sanskrit manuscripts — one of the largest manuscript bodies on earth — mostly carry no…

Assyriology, sitting on hundreds of thousands of digitized tablets, learned to treat administrative writing as a statistical population: text types and formulae in the Ur III archives follow heavy-tailed frequency distributions with stable shape parameters. Medieval English charters, digitized in the DEEDS…

Homeric scholarship quantified what oral tradition does to a text: in the early Ptolemaic papyri, variants cluster at formulaic joints, where a singer could swap one traditional phrase for another. The Qur'an sits at the opposite pole of the oral-written interface: an…

Byzantinists can rank ancient Greek works by popularity because Pinakes counts surviving copies: a few texts survive in hundreds of manuscripts while most survive in one, and the shape of that concentration is a signature of the copying economy. The manuscript libraries…

Papyrology turned everyday paperwork into demography: from tens of thousands of dated Egyptian documents, it measured how long contracts, receipts, and letters were kept before being discarded, yielding retention curves for ordinary writing. The Dunhuang library cave in western China preserved thousands…

The Database of Byzantine Book Epigrams showed that Greek scribes signed off with stock verses — "as travellers rejoice to see their homeland, so scribes rejoice to see the end of a book" — and that tracking these formulas across manuscripts maps…

Numismatists read a coin hoard by its age profile: the mix of old and new coins follows a predictable circulation-decay curve, and deviations from the curve flag wars, recoinages, and crises. The Cairo Genizah is, structurally, a paper hoard — centuries of…

Historians of astronomy identify the ancestry of a medieval table not by its words but by its parameters: the buried numerical constants betray the source tradition even when everything else is rewritten, and DISHAS was built to fingerprint them. Gregorian chant is…

The study of ancient dice and astragali uses simple uniformity statistics to ask whether the randomizer was fair; the same tests have rarely been turned on the texts the randomizers pointed to. The Sortes Astrampsychi — antiquity's bestselling fortune-telling handbook, preserved on…

Thirteenth-century Paris and seventh-century-BCE Babylon both ran commentary industries: the scholastics cited Augustine and Aristotle; Babylonian scholars wrote tablets explicating the omen series and lexical lists, citing canonical works by incipit and invoking other scholarly traditions. The Latin side has been quantified…

The study of women's textual production built a workable instrument out of colophons: gendered formulas of commissioning and copying, counted at scale, yield a measurable female share of book production, and in Latin Europe that share is small. Dunhuang's Buddhist manuscripts carry…

Unseen-species estimators — the mathematics behind estimating how much medieval Latin literature is lost — need only one ingredient: repeated independent sightings of the same underlying items. The stone inscriptions of Angkor-era Cambodia provide exactly that ingredient in an unexpected form: Old…

Cartometry treats an old map as a measurement instrument gone slightly wrong: regressing portolan-chart positions on true coordinates recovers the error structure, and the error structure identifies the sources. Islamicate civilization left an even better target than charts — thousands of city…

Medieval computus — the Easter-reckoning literature — offers historians a rare gift: tables whose internal arithmetic can be checked, yielding measured scribal error rates per copied operation. Classic Maya monuments offer the same gift in stone: a Long Count date, its Calendar…

The Ur III state of Mesopotamia (around 2100 BCE) left roughly a hundred thousand administrative tablets, and Assyriologists learned to reconstruct its bureaucratic hierarchy statistically — disambiguating names and inferring rank from who appears with whom, and in what position, across thousands…

Gregorian chant became a quantitative field when its notation was databased: Cantus clusters hundreds of thousands of melodies by notated incipit, and notation density can be tracked over time. Ethiopian liturgical chant (zema) has its own indigenous notation — the mǝlǝkkǝt, interlinear…

Papyrologists measured a canonization in progress: early Ptolemaic Homer papyri are "wild," with extra lines and variants everywhere, and the variant rate collapses over about two centuries as the Alexandrian text takes hold — a stabilization curve with a measurable rate constant.…

Hadith science built the most formal transmission-audit apparatus of the premodern world — the isnad, a chain of named transmitters — and modern analysis tests those chains statistically, checking generation-lengths against plausible lifespans and finding "common links" where a diffuse tradition was…