One Thousand and One Conjectures

Joins capture-recapture ecology to Greek philology: ecologists estimate how many species they have never seen from the ratio of species observed exactly once to species observed exactly twice, and the same arithmetic applies to books. Each surviving witness to a Greek work…

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…

A Theban taxpayer paid the same capitation taxes year after year, and each payment generated an ostracon receipt naming him — so a payer who appears once should often appear twice, and the multiplicity distribution of names across receipt series is a…

At Mons Claudianus, water was rationed by written chits — small ostraca tying named individuals to daily allowances in a desert quarry where every drop was accounted. A rationing system generates paperwork proportional to headcount, so the chit corpus is a demographic…

The famous millions of South Asian manuscripts hide a simpler and more dangerous statistic: how many copies each distinct work survives in. A recopying economy driven by curriculum and ritual demand should concentrate copies on a small canon while leaving the long…

South Asianists agree the extant corpus is a fraction of what was written, but the fraction has rarely been given a number with a method behind it. Ecology has the method: mark-recapture, where the overlap between two independent samples of a population…

Subhāṣita anthologies — the medieval collections of quotable verses — sampled the poetry of their day the way a sediment core samples a vanished lake: verse by verse, with attributions, from whatever was circulating. Because the anthologist sampled circulation while the recopying…

Ecologists estimate unseen animal populations by capture-recapture: tag what you catch, and count how often you catch it again. Javanese copper-plate charters permit the same trick on documents, because later courts re-issued and re-engraved older grants (the tinulad copies), so a single…

We cannot read a single pre-1500 Khmer palm-leaf book, but the stones talk about documents constantly: royal orders received, prior deeds consulted, registers checked, rulings recorded. The conjecture is a deliberately austere piece of accounting: treat every explicit epigraphic mention of a…

Timbuktu's manuscript world has been sampled twice by partly independent digitization efforts — organized library digitization on one side, family- and region-based field projects on the other. Where two independent samples of one underlying population exist, ecology's mark-recapture logic applies to books…

Ecologists estimate how many species they have never seen by comparing two independent samples of a population, and the Maya sign inventory can be treated exactly the same way: the four surviving codices are one sample of the script, and the stone-monument…

Species-richness estimators of the Chao family infer how many species were never observed from the ratio of once-seen to twice-seen types, and the surviving Maya codices permit exactly this move: treat each self-contained almanac or table unit as a type, and each…

Archives that keep duplicate copies accidentally build a population estimator into their own holdings: if khipu accounts were made in matching sets — one cord record retained locally, a counterpart carried up the administrative line, a practice consistent with matching-number khipus reported…

Classic Maya artists sometimes signed their work — signature phrases occur on carved monuments and painted vessels — and a signing culture accidentally runs a census of its own workforce: capture-recapture on named artists across signed objects estimates the population of scribes…

The Maya syllabic grid — the consonant-vowel table that epigraphers have been filling in for decades — still has empty cells, and the standing question is whether those cells were empty in the script or are empty only in the surviving sample.…

Ecologists count fish they cannot see by capture-recapture: tag a sample, resample, and the overlap reveals the population. Ur III bookkeeping recorded single transactions redundantly — a delivery could generate a receipt, a ledger entry, and a line in an annual account…

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…

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…