The illustrated Shahnama is longer

Claim (verbatim)

The illustrated Shahnama is longer. This connects art patronage with textual growth in the Persian epic tradition. Shahnama copies vary by thousands of verses, and the variation is usually treated as scribal drift. The conjecture: interpolation was patron-driven. A royal commission was a completeness market, the fullest Book of Kings was the selling point, and an illustrated cycle positively demanded the interpolated episodes that carried famous scenes, so workshops swept in secondary epic material to feed the picture program. Luxury should correlate with textual bloat, and plain scholarly copies with restraint, verse counts rising with the splendor of the object rather than with its date alone.

Prediction clause (verbatim)

Among dated Shahnama manuscripts of the 14th-16th centuries with recorded verse counts, illustrated copies exceed unillustrated copies of the same half-century in median verse count by at least 5%, and interpolated epic material (Barzunama and similar episodes) appears at least twice as frequently in illustrated copies. Primary clause: the 5%-or-greater median verse-count excess of illustrated over unillustrated contemporaries; the verdict follows it.

Kill-dataset (verbatim)

Kill: the Cambridge Shahnama Project database, which records illustration status, dates, contents, and extent for over a thousand Shahnama manuscripts.

Novelty / leakage triage

provisional — model-triaged, shepherd review pending

A provisional first pass authored by the model (Opus), not yet confirmed by the shepherd. It carries the same dated-search requirements as an authoritative verdict but is excluded from every headline figure and cannot underwrite a prediction until a shepherd confirms it. Provisional reading: Adjacent (closely related prior work exists).

The qualitative link is documented: illustrated/luxury Shahnama copies are exactly the ones that absorb interpolated secondary epic material -- surviving manuscripts are catalogued as 'illustrated ... with interpolations from the Garshaspnama and the Barzunama', and the Cambridge Shahnama Project records illustration status, date, contents and extent for well over a thousand copies. Not located: the item's quantified correlation -- illustrated copies exceeding unillustrated contemporaries in median verse count by >=5%, with interpolated episodes at least twice as frequent in illustrated copies -- as an executed measurement over the Cambridge database. Patron-driven interpolation in luxury copies is documented by example; the verse-count correlation is unrun.

• Cambridge Shahnama Project (illustration status, dates, contents, extent for 1000+ manuscripts) — The kill dataset joining illustration status to textual extent
• Harvard Art Museums, 'Illustrated Manuscript of the Shahnama ... with interpolations from the Garshaspnama and the Barzunama' — Luxury illustrated copies carrying interpolated secondary-epic episodes

Predictions

No prediction registered yet.