One Thousand and One Conjectures

Scribes routinely closed their work with self-deprecating apologies — “forgive the faults of the unworthy scribe” — and the naive reading treats these as confessions from careless copyists. The claim inverts that: such formulae are costly quality signals, the mark of a…

A scribe copying from an exemplar in front of him makes errors of the eye — confusing letters that look alike — whereas a scribe taking down a text read aloud, as in dictation or the pecia system of mass university production,…

Radiocarbon dating works because decay happens at a constant rate; the conjecture is that manuscript copying does too. Scribes make errors, and within a single scriptorium — same training, same exemplars, same working conditions — the rate of new errors introduced per…

Information theory meets Homer: the stock formulas of oral epic — the swift-footed heroes and wine-dark seas — are here interpreted as redundancy bits, the padding a noisy channel needs to protect its payload. In transmission over fallible human memory, the hard-to-recover…

Two transmission technologies for Sanskrit ran side by side for centuries: the mnemonic machinery of Vedic recitation — interlocking recitation modes and error-checking permutations built to preserve the Rigveda syllable-perfect — and ordinary manuscript copying, which carried texts like the Mahābhārata. Philologists…

Joins the cognitive psychology of recall to the stemmatics of oral law. The serial-position curve is among psychology's oldest findings: in reproducing a fixed sequence, people hold the beginning and end best and blur the middle. Iceland's law was exactly such a…

Capture-recapture statistics estimate a population's size from the overlap between independent samples — tag fish, resample, count the recaptures. This conjecture treats the great Sanskrit subhashita anthologies — the Subhashitaratnakosha, Saduktikarnamrita, and Sharngadharapaddhati — as quasi-independent samples drawn from a floating ocean…