The court poet works in stone and leaf at once

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)

The men who composed copper-plate praśastis were trained kāvya poets, and some signed their names on the plates themselves. If the same labour pool wrote plate eulogies and transmitted literature, a measurable fraction of named plate poets should reappear in the prosopography of surviving works — and the matches should cluster in kāvya and poetics, not in śāstra. The overlap rate would quantify how integrated the epigraphic and manuscript literary economies were, a question currently settled by a handful of famous anecdotes rather than measurement. If it holds, precisely dated plates hand absolute dates to otherwise floating literary careers, tightening the chronology of the poetic tradition through its stoniest, best-dated edge.

Prediction clause (verbatim)

Of praśasti composers named in published copper-plate and major stone-inscription corpora, at least 10% will match authors recorded in the Pandit database after controlling for chance name-collision with a random-name baseline, and the matched group will be over-represented in kāvya and alaṃkāra relative to the general author population by at least a factor of 2. Primary clause: the match rate exceeding the collision baseline at the 10% level; the genre clustering is secondary.

Kill-dataset (verbatim)

Named inscription composers from published epigraphic corpora checked against author records in 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

That praśasti composers were trained kāvya poets who also authored literature (Hariṣeṇa, Ravikīrti) is a commonplace, but measuring the overlap as a chance-corrected match rate (>=10% above name-collision baseline; 2x kāvya/alaṃkāra clustering) between named plate poets and the Pandit prosopography is un-run.

'Prashasti' (Grokipedia) — composed by court poets versed in mahākāvya
'Aihole inscription' (Wikipedia) — Ravikīrti, praśasti-composer and poet

Predictions

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