Ask the date, learn the sect

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)

Pre-print South Asia ran several calendars at once — Vikrama, Śaka, Nepal Samvat, Kali years — and a scribe's choice among them was not free: it followed community, liturgical habit, and local administrative practice. A colophon's era system is therefore a barcode, encoding sectarian and institutional provenance independently of the text being copied. If the coupling is tight, era choice alone should predict a manuscript's religious affiliation at high accuracy, turning tens of thousands of otherwise provenance-poor catalogue records into a mapped sociology of copying communities. If it holds, catalogues can back-fill missing provenance at scale, and shifts in era usage over time become measurable events in institutional history rather than antiquarian trivia.

Prediction clause (verbatim)

In dated NGMPP/NGMCP colophons, a classifier using only the era system plus the date will predict Buddhist versus non-Buddhist textual affiliation with at least 80% accuracy, with Nepal Samvat over-represented among Buddhist manuscripts by at least a factor of 2 relative to its share among Śaiva and Vaiṣṇava manuscripts. Primary clause: the factor-2 over-representation of Nepal Samvat in Buddhist copies; classifier accuracy is secondary.

Kill-dataset (verbatim)

Era systems and dates extracted from NGMPP/NGMCP catalogue colophons, with the religious affiliation of works checked through the Pandit database.

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

Generated blind in a single Write with no reads, web access, or database queries; this is the second attempt for wave W14 after a prior instance died to a network error before writing its packet.

Novelty / leakage triage

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

Multiple co-existing eras (Vikrama, Śaka, Nepal Samvat) and their community/administrative conditioning are known, and Nepal Samvat's association with Newar Buddhist copying is documented, but era-choice as a machine-readable affiliation classifier (>=80% accuracy; 2x Nepal-Samvat over-representation) is un-run.

'Nepal Sambat' (Wikipedia) — era usage alongside Śaka/Vikrama in colophons
Malla, 'Nepal Samvat: The National Era of Nepal', HIMALAYA

Predictions

No prediction registered yet.

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