Women commission where merit is counted

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)

Temple donative inscriptions across South Asia record substantial female donor shares: religious giving was a recognized women's economy, carved in stone by the thousand. Manuscript colophons also record commissioning patrons, and if the same merit economy governed book-making, female patronage should appear there too — but split by genre, strong in devotional and merit-generating genres and near-absent in curriculum śāstra, which was commissioned for male professional formation. The stone record and the leaf record should show the same gendered structure because both draw on one devotional economy. If it holds, women were structural patrons of a defined sector of manuscript production, and their catalogue-visible share becomes a lower-bound estimator of female religious spending in the book economy.

Prediction clause (verbatim)

In NGMPP/NGMCP colophons naming a commissioning patron, the female share among devotional and merit-genre manuscripts (stotra, purāṇa, sūtra-copying) will exceed the female share among śāstra manuscripts by at least a factor of 3, and the devotional-genre female share will itself be at least 5%. Primary clause: the at-least-threefold genre split in female patronage share; the absolute 5% level is secondary.

Kill-dataset (verbatim)

Patron names and genre fields in NGMPP/NGMCP catalogue colophon records, with genre classification assisted by 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

Substantial female donor shares in temple/stupa inscriptions are well documented (Orr; Buddhist Deccan epigraphy), but the cross-medium prediction — female patronage in manuscript colophons genre-split (>=3x higher in devotional/merit genres than śāstra) — is un-run.

Predictions

No prediction registered yet.

Weigh in

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