The temple ledger is a library catalogue in stone

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 and monastic donative inscriptions occasionally record gifts of books — titles, sometimes counts, dated and localized — which makes them tiny dated library catalogues in a medium that survives without recopying. Because stone samples the act of donation while manuscript catalogues sample eventual survival, the two records should differ predictably: inscriptionally donated titles should skew toward prestigious, canonical, commemorable works relative to the survival-shaped genre mix of actual collections. Matching the stone-recorded titles to known works measures both the identifiability of a dated cross-section of circulating literature and the donation bias itself. If it holds, book-donation inscriptions become fixed, dated anchors for the circulation history of specific works — an epigraphic complement to colophon dating.

Prediction clause (verbatim)

At least 70% of book titles recorded in published book-donation inscriptions will be identifiable with works in the Pandit database, and the combined śāstra-plus-scripture share among donated titles will exceed the śāstra-plus-scripture share of the NGMPP/NGMCP catalogue taken as a whole. Primary clause: the at-least-70% identifiability rate; the genre-skew comparison is secondary.

Kill-dataset (verbatim)

Titles from published book-donation inscriptions matched against the Pandit database, with the genre baseline computed from the NGMPP/NGMCP catalogue.

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

Donative epigraphy (including book/text gifts) as durable dated records is studied, but treating book-donation inscriptions as dated library cross-sections — >=70% title-identifiability plus a prestige/canon genre-skew versus survival-shaped collections — is un-run. Thin field.

'Donative Epigraphy in Ancient South Asia' (Sahapedia)

Predictions

No prediction registered yet.

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