Two copying regimes, two curves

Status: Anticipated · untested

Status is derived only from the shepherd-authored triage/prediction data above -- community submissions and claims are a separate overlay and can never change it (see the participation panel below).

This is a proposed connection between two domains, generated by a language model. It is not an article and not evidence: it sits below the evidence/publication boundary. A quantitative prediction and a named kill-dataset are attached (when registered) so the claim stays falsifiable rather than merely evocative.

Claim (verbatim)

Some Greek texts were copied because churches were required to have them (liturgy prescribed by the typikon), others because readers admired them (homilies, theology, classics). These are different economies: prescribed books face a demand set by the number of altars — every church needs one, none needs five — while admired books spread by reputation feeding on itself. The conjecture is that the two economies leave two different statistical fingerprints in survival: liturgically mandated works should show narrow, peaked witness-count distributions, while prestige-driven works show heavy tails with a few blockbusters and a long fringe. If the fingerprints separate cleanly, one can read a lost book culture's acquisition logic — quota or fashion — off the shape of its survival curve alone.

Prediction clause (verbatim)

Primary clause: fitting witness-count distributions in Pinakes, works classifiable as liturgically prescribed are assigned to a narrow (lognormal-like, low dispersion) family and non-liturgical literary works to a heavy-tailed family, with the classification separating the two classes at 75% accuracy or better. Secondary: the liturgical class's coefficient of variation is less than half the literary class's.

Kill-dataset (verbatim)

In-house Pinakes Greek works-by-witnesses counts, with works flagged as liturgical versus non-liturgical by genre.

Nobody has run this test. The kill-data is named above. If you can run it — or you know the paper that already settles it — claim the kill or submit the prior. Kills and priors are credited here, by name, as they come in.

In the atlas

This conjecture is bridged, as an L1 lead, onto these Inferpedia subject pages.

Provenance

Run: Fresh agent generation · model: claude-fable-5

This packet was produced in a single blind Write from model-internal knowledge only, with no repository reads, web access, database queries, or any tool call other than this Write.

Novelty / leakage triage

anticipated in the literature — this exact test has never been run

Heavy-tailed witness-count distributions in manuscript survival are published (complex-systems work on text transmission), but splitting the distribution by acquisition regime — quota-driven liturgical vs prestige-driven literary — and classifying works by curve shape is un-run.

'On the transmission of texts: written cultures as complex systems' (arXiv 2025)

Predictions

No prediction registered yet.

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