One Thousand and One Conjectures

Copies per text follow preferential attachment: power-law copy counts, with survival size-biased so bestsellers over-survive superlinearly. Falsify: medieval library catalogs vs extant counts.

Mesopotamian city sizes inferred from tablet volumes obey Zipf's law, with the exponent flattening (primate-city dominance) under imperial integration. Falsify: archive-volume rank-size by period.

Joins measurement theory (the error bar as a signal in its own right) to third-century political history: the width of the date range a modern editor can assign to a document is a thermometer of the dating formulas, regnal clarity, and bureaucratic…

Joins macro-econometric common-shock identification to Eastern Christian codicology: a conquest wave is legible as a synchronized same-decade production trough across manuscript traditions that share geography but nothing else, while an out-of-theater tradition serves as the control arm.

Selection bias from art-market economics meets Assyriology's sampling problem: the antiquities market is a high-pass filter for glamour, so unprovenienced (market-bought) tablets are systematically enriched in literary, lexical, and royal genres relative to excavated tablets of the same period, because dealers selected…

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

Manuscripts became binding waste on an institutional obsolescence clock, not a material wear-out clock.

Production mode (visual exemplar copying vs dictation/pecia mass production) is recoverable from error typology alone.

Greenland lead deposition from Roman smelting is a proxy for silver output; predict lead flux co-moves with denarius fineness and leads Egyptian papyri price inflation by roughly a decade. Falsify: ice-core lead vs papyrological price series.

Viking hack-silver should follow the universal power-law mass distribution of brittle fragmentation; deviations mark the arrival of weighed-payment standards. Falsify: fragment masses in Cuerdale and Spillings hoards.

Hoard deposition is antiquity's VIX: deposition rates should lead invasions in narrative sources by months (people bury on rumor), and non-recovery rates should scale with conflict mortality. Falsify: dated hoard databases vs chronicle chronology.

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.

Coin wear per year (calibrated on dated issues) measures circulation velocity; predict velocity spikes in crises as hoards dishoard. Falsify: 3D wear metrology on stratified site finds.

Ur III beer-and-barley rations show nominal rigidity: unchanged through price shocks, with adjustment hidden in quality. Falsify: ration quantities vs barley price proxies across archives.

Mesopotamian debt-cancellation edicts should leave a physical signature — smashed or discarded loan tablets clustering at royal accession years. Falsify: tablet discard contexts vs king lists.

Relic translations should cluster in the five years before major building fundraising — acquisitions as anchor investments. Falsify: translation dates vs cathedral fabric accounts.

Shrine market shares (Thames badge finds) follow Polya-urn path dependence: early leads persist beyond what miracle registers justify. Falsify: badge chronology vs miracle-count records.

Babylonian temple lending should expand exactly when private-house lending contracts — lender-of-last-resort behavior in the Old Babylonian credit market. Falsify: dated loan tablets sorted by lender type.

As Greenland ivory prices fell against elephant ivory, Norse hunters intensified into riskier, more distant grounds — income-target behavior, not profit maximization. Falsify: the existing ivory isotope sequence against price series; profit-maximizers would have quit, not pushed north.

Provenance distance-decay exponents should scale with value density: Mayen lava millstones should decay steeper than fine pottery by precisely the ratio of transport cost to unit value. Falsify: sourced distribution maps.

English market charters before the 13th-century spacing statute should already show the statutory spacing — law codifying a self-organized equilibrium, not creating one. Falsify: charter geodata pre- and post-statute.

Staff notation cut chant copying errors discontinuously: predict per-neume Levenshtein error drops by half across the Guidonian transition within single traditions. Falsify: aligned chant stemmas.

Within a scriptorium, per-copy error rates are constant enough to date manuscripts by error accumulation, like a decay clock. Falsify: error counts vs colophon-dated families.

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.

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.

The Aṣṭādhyāyī's rule ordering sits near the minimum-description-length optimum over permutations of its own rules. Falsify: computational reordering search.

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.

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.

Pompeian wall dialogues should follow the same reply-depth distribution as modern forum threads — conversational universals across two millennia. Falsify: CIL IV thread reconstruction.

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

The map's segment errors should cluster by province, revealing the distinct source itineraries it was compiled from — stemmatics of a map. Falsify: error-variance clustering.

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

Late Bronze Age destruction order follows betweenness centrality in the metals network, not geographic dominoes. Falsify: destruction-layer dates vs modeled network centrality.

Spacing is quantized at camel-day intervals with variance shrinking over centuries — infrastructural standardization as measurable convergence. Falsify: dated caravanserai coordinates.

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

Bronze Age route networks around Mesopotamian tells should match Physarum-style optimal transport given tell sizes as sources. Falsify: CORONA-imagery hollow-way maps vs simulation.

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.

The Shannon entropy of shipwreck cargo composition falls a generation before political fragmentation — markets disintegrate first. Falsify: Parker/Strauss wreck databases.

Daughter houses space themselves by competitive exclusion into a tessellation with a minimum-distance rule, violated only along wool routes. Falsify: foundation geodata.

The fair calendar is a solved traveling-merchant problem: dates minimize total circuit dead-time, and its wartime breakdown measurably rerouted trade to sea. Falsify: calendar optimization plus toll series.

Kontor privileges track member cities' route-control Shapley values and re-rank after route shocks. Falsify: privilege lists vs network model.

The Byzantine fire-signal chain sits at viewshed-redundancy optima under fog noise — reliability maximization, not station minimization. Falsify: GIS viewshed analysis vs alternative sitings.

Iron Age fort intervisibility graphs are small-world, and abandonment sequences preserve connectivity — graceful degradation. Falsify: DEM viewsheds plus dating.

Route alignments fit Wardrop user-equilibrium (individually shortest time), not system optimum; imperial upgrades target exactly the congestion externalities. Falsify: least-cost GIS vs surveyed alignments.

Piece-form boundaries (elephant becoming bishop) should coincide with documented rule-variant boundaries — objects tracking rules across Eurasia. Falsify: find typology vs textual rules.

Gradient error accumulates as √distance between inspection shafts — surveying as a bounded random walk with resets. Falsify: laser-level surveys of Nîmes and Segovia channels.

Successive Gothic campaigns move monotonically toward the thrust-line optimum — iterative structural learning with a measurable decreasing loss. Falsify: dated buttress geometries under limit analysis.

Cathedral heights escalate against rivals within a diocesan radius by roughly fixed increments until the material frontier (Beauvais's collapse sits exactly there). Falsify: height/date/distance panel.