One Thousand and One Conjectures

Letter length is elastic to writing-surface price: Geniza paper letters should be systematically longer than earlier parchment letters of the same genre, with elasticity matching the price ratio. Falsify: corpus word counts.

Parchment was a livestock derivative, so manuscript production absorbed herd shocks: colophon-dated production series in NW Europe should dip with a 1–3 year lag after documented cattle murrains, with no equivalent dip in paper-based production once paper is available as a control.

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.

Roman brickyard outputs (CIL XV stamps) should show Pareto-distributed firm sizes and growth independent of size — modern firm dynamics in the ancient economy. Falsify: stamp counts per figlina over time.

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.

The latitudes engraved on surviving astrolabe plates should follow the population distribution of customer cities — medieval product-line economics. Falsify: plate-latitude inventories vs city-size estimates.

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.

Salt-bar masses across the trans-Saharan network should show coefficient-of-variation as low as coinage — a commodity currency union. Falsify: recorded and surviving bar weights, Taghaza to Timbuktu.

Gold-dust weights on the Zimbabwe plateau should match Kilwa's coastal coin-weight standard — Indian Ocean monetary integration reaching 400 km inland. Falsify: excavated weight artifacts.

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.

Joins index-number theory (chained consumer-price-index construction) to Tamil temple epigraphy: thousands of dated endowment inscriptions quoting paddy, ghee, and oil rates for perpetual lamps constitute a computable medieval price index, and Chola war finance should be visible in it as inflation episodes.

Joins the economics of luxury counterfeiting to Japanese sword connoisseurship: forged signatures (gimei) on blades are counterfeit branding, so the forgery rate should rise steeply with the smith's brand equity, exactly as fake rates concentrate in the top handbag brands today.

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…

Joins the economics of protection rackets (extraction is priced to the victim's outside option, so it rises with the victim's internal weakness) to Han-Xiongnu diplomacy: heqin tribute schedules should ratchet up after Han domestic crises, not after Xiongnu battlefield victories.

Friedman's plucking model of business cycles meets documentary papyrology: aggregate documentary output runs along an administrative-capacity ceiling from which crises pluck it downward, so the depth of a collapse predicts the speed of the subsequent recovery, while the size of a boom…

Flight-to-quality from financial crises meets papyrological geography: when documentary output contracts, surviving documentation concentrates into fewer, safer places, exactly as liquidity concentrates into safe assets under market stress.

Fluctuation scaling from statistical physics meets the geography of documentary survival: across places, the variance of documentary output scales as a power of its mean with an exponent strictly between the Poisson value of 1 (independent accidents of survival) and the synchrony…

The term structure of interest rates meets Old Assyrian merchant finance: Kanesh-trade interest was customary rather than market-clearing, so the yield curve is flat — annualized rates independent of maturity — while risk was priced instead in default-penalty clauses that do scale…

Price-ceiling economics meets Roman epigraphy: Diocletian's Price Edict of 301 CE worked exactly as shortage theory predicts — goods capped below prevailing market prices withdrew from recorded exchange, while goods capped at or above market stayed visible, so the Edict's failure is…

Absenteeism econometrics meets the pharaoh's tomb-builders: the royal workmen treated the Egyptian ten-day week exactly as modern workforces treat Fridays — absence hazard spikes on workdays adjacent to rest days, manufacturing long weekends, and a small cadre of chronic absentees carries most…

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…

Common-value auction theory meets Venetian state finance: the incanti — annual auctions of state galley charters — were common-value auctions in which patrician bidders demonstrably learned to shade bids across 150 years, the earliest documented winner's-curse correction.