Counting years as a house badge

Status: No prior located

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)

Geʽez colophons date manuscripts by several concurrent eras — Year of Mercy, Year of the World, Era of the Martyrs — often stacked two or three deep. This conjecture says the choice among them was not free variation or fashion but a network marker: monastic filiations such as the rival Ewosṭatean and Täklä Haymanot houses taught distinct dating habits in their scriptoria, so era usage should cluster by monastic affiliation and region more strongly than by period. The dullest line of the colophon becomes a tracer dye for the Ethiopian scribal network, and unprovenanced manuscripts can be assigned to houses by how they count years. If it holds, we gain a cheap provenance tool for thousands of books; if era choice proves spatially homogeneous, then colophon formulae were a genuinely national curriculum — itself a striking fact about how uniform Ethiopian scribal training was.

Prediction clause (verbatim)

Primary clause: among Beta maṣāḥǝft colophons with known institutional provenance, era-system combinations cluster significantly by monastic network (permutation or chi-square test, p < 0.01), with affiliation explaining more of the variance than half-century of production does. Killed if, once date is controlled, era usage is statistically homogeneous across networks and regions.

Kill-dataset (verbatim)

Beta maṣāḥǝft — colophon formulae with institutional provenance links.

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 by a fresh claude-fable-5 instance in a single Write with no reads, web access, database queries, or other tool calls.

Novelty / leakage triage

no prior formulation located (search dated 2026-07-10)

Era systems in Ethiopian colophons (Year of Mercy, Era of Martyrs, etc.) are described in calendrical scholarship, and colophon-era study exists for the adjacent Coptic tradition, but no work treating era choice as a monastic-network marker or provenance tool was located. Thin field: Ethiopian colophon statistics barely exist, so this is a low-locatability result.

Predictions

No prediction registered yet.

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