Demography of the unfree

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 temple inscriptions enumerate thousands of temple servants and slaves by personal name — the largest named non-elite population to survive from pre-1500 Southeast Asia, recorded incidentally by donors bent on glory, not on demography. The conjecture joins onomastics to population science: because Khmer servant names include conventional birth-order names, month-names, and ethnonyms, the frequency structure of the lists encodes recoverable demographic parameters — family size, cohort structure, recruitment geography — of a population no chronicle deigned to describe. The mechanism is bureaucratic inheritance: the stone lists were copied from working temple registers, now lost, and so preserve real census structure rather than literary invention. If it holds, the servant lists become the region's earliest recoverable census, and a genre carved to flatter the powerful quietly preserves the statistical shape of the enslaved.

Prediction clause (verbatim)

Pooling servant-name lists across the corpus, name-frequency distributions will be internally consistent across regions (rank-order correlation of at least 0.7 between major provinces), and conventional birth-order-name frequencies will decline monotonically with implied birth rank in proportions permitting a stable family-size estimate that agrees across regions within 20%. Primary clause: the monotone, cross-regionally consistent birth-order-name decline; the verdict follows it.

Kill-dataset (verbatim)

The Cœdès / DHARMA Khmer inscription inventory (K-numbers — the standard Khmer epigraphic corpus): onomastic statistics over the temple-servant name lists.

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

Close prior: Lustig & Lustig (2013) ran numerical/demographic analyses over exactly these servant-name lists (sex ratios, juveniles, status categories), so the lists-as-census direction is firmly anticipated; but the onomastic operationalization — birth-order-name frequency decline as a family-size estimator with cross-regional consistency — is un-run.

Lustig & Lustig 2013, 'New insights into les interminables listes nominatives des esclaves', Aseanie 31

Predictions

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