The chancery press run

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)

Everyone knows the print run as Gutenberg's invention; fewer know that in the late twelfth century the Khmer king Jayavarman VII had a nearly identical Sanskrit edict engraved on stelae at hospital foundations scattered across his empire — the same text, many copies, hundreds of kilometres apart. Treat those duplicate stelae as a press run and apply manuscript stemmatics, the family-tree method philologists use on scribal copies, to the small variants among them: the variant tree should reconstruct the lost chancery workflow, revealing how many perishable master copies were prepared and along which routes they were carried out for engraving. Engravers at distant sites could not have worked from one stone; a set of palm-leaf or similar masters is structurally necessary, and their copying faults should be inherited tree-fashion by the stones. If it holds, the internal organization of a vanished Angkorian secretariat becomes readable from its stone output, and 'publication before print' gains a dated, countable Southeast Asian case.

Prediction clause (verbatim)

Full collation of the duplicate hospital-edict stelae will show shared variants partitioning the copies into a small number of consistent families — at most four — with statistically significant clustering against the null of a star phylogeny (all copies independently descending from one master). Primary clause: variant-sharing resolves the stelae into no more than four well-supported families; the verdict follows it. Secondary clause: family membership will correlate with geographic corridor out of the capital rather than with raw inter-site distance.

Kill-dataset (verbatim)

The Cœdès / DHARMA Khmer inscription inventory (K-numbers — the standard Khmer epigraphic corpus): collation of the variant readings across the duplicate hospital-edict stelae it records.

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 by a fresh instance working only from the inline prompt, with no file reads, web access, or database queries.

Novelty / leakage triage

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

The duplicate hospital-edict stelae of Jayavarman VII are a classic corpus (Finot 1903; Coedes' comparative studies) and variants among copies are noted in the editions, but no stemmatic/phylogenetic collation reconstructing the number of perishable master copies or distribution corridors has been located. Thin, largely non-web-accessible francophone literature; anticipation is qualitative only.

Predictions

No prediction registered yet.

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