One Thousand and One Conjectures

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.

Joins transport-cost linear programming to the Codex Mendoza: the Aztec tribute assignment approximates the solution of a value-per-porter-load optimization, so distance from Tenochtitlan should predict the value density of what a province owed.

Joins web-graph topology (the Broder bowtie anatomy of the early web) to hadith science: the transmission paths from the Prophet to the canonical collectors route through a tiny strongly-connected core of professional transmitters, the classical madar phenomenon, giving the corpus the same…

Joins eigenvector centrality to Roman jurisprudence: the Law of Citations of 426 CE, which privileged five jurists, mostly legislated what network centrality would compute from the jurists' own cross-citations, with Gaius as the deliberate, measurable exception smuggled in from the classroom.

Vertical-monopoly pricing from industrial organization meets the toll castles of the Holy Roman Empire: a chain of independent tolls on one river overcharges relative to a single owner, so consolidation of adjacent tolls under one prince should cut the combined rate and…