One collapse, two kingdoms

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)

Angkorian Cambodia and Campā were rivals with different politics and increasingly different religious trajectories, yet written Sanskrit dies in both epigraphies within roughly the same two or three generations around the thirteenth to fourteenth century. The conjecture: the synchrony is not coincidence or parallel local conversion but the failure of a shared upstream supply line — the trans-regional circulation of Sanskrit teachers and manuscripts on which both chanceries depended — so the two corpora should show not merely synchronized terminal dates but synchronized quality decay beforehand, as the last generations composed from thinning resources. Independent local causes would decay the corpora on independent schedules; a common supply shock decays them in phase, the way two lamps on one gas line gutter together. If it holds, the end of the Sanskrit age in Southeast Asia becomes a single connected event with a measurable signature, and the lost inter-Asian manuscript traffic is demonstrated precisely by the manner of its stopping.

Prediction clause (verbatim)

Comparing the final two centuries of Sanskrit production in the Khmer and Cham corpora, both will show rising rates of metrical and grammatical fault per stanza, with the decay in phase: terminal Sanskrit dates within 75 years of each other and onsets of measurable quality decline within 50 years of each other. Primary clause: the in-phase quality decline (matched onsets within 50 years); the verdict follows it.

Kill-dataset (verbatim)

The DHARMA project editions (machine-readable Sanskrit/vernacular inscriptions of South & Southeast Asia): parallel fault-rate series over the late Sanskrit strata of the Khmer and Cham corpora it edits.

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 roughly synchronous end of Sanskrit epigraphy in Cambodia (last dated Sanskrit K.488, 1295) and Campa (1253) is noted, and Pollock's 'death of Sanskrit' frames a supply-side cosmopolis collapse; but the specific in-phase quality-decay test — parallel fault-rate series with matched onsets within 50 years — has never been computed. Thin-field flag.

Predictions

No prediction registered yet.

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