Six degrees of Angkor

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)

Hundreds of named elites — priests, officials, royal kin — recur across multiple Khmer inscriptions at different temples and provinces. Join prosopography to network science: link every co-attestation of named individuals into a graph, and its shape measures how integrated the Angkorian elite actually was; and since a single giant social component cannot be maintained across a monsoon empire by travel alone, high integration structurally implies regular written communication — orders and letters on perishable media — as its carrying infrastructure. The conjecture is that within any half-century window the elite co-attestation network forms one giant component with short paths, a small world, rather than fragmenting into regional cliques. If it holds, Angkor's cohesion becomes a measured property rather than an impression, and the lost correspondence that sustained it becomes an inferred necessity with a network-sized footprint.

Prediction clause (verbatim)

Building a co-attestation network of named individuals per half-century window, the largest connected component will contain at least 60% of multiply-attested individuals in each central Angkorian window, with a mean shortest path of at most 4, and this structure will hold across at least three consecutive windows. Primary clause: the giant component containing at least 60% of multiply-attested individuals; the verdict follows it.

Kill-dataset (verbatim)

The Cœdès / DHARMA Khmer inscription inventory (K-numbers — the standard Khmer epigraphic corpus): prosopographic co-attestation network construction over named individuals.

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

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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

Quantitative prosopography over Angkorian officials exists (Lustig's analyses of official roles, status and territorial control from inscription data), anticipating the elite-integration direction, but no co-attestation graph with giant-component and path-length statistics has been built for the Khmer corpus; comparable SNA has been done for Maya epigraphy, underscoring the method's availability without this application.

Predictions

No prediction registered yet.

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