The recopying wall

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)

Sahel manuscripts live on paper in termite country, so books survived by being recopied, not by lasting. This conjecture claims the consequence is a sharp physical horizon: almost no codex in the Timbuktu collections physically predates the mid-sixteenth century even where composition dates run back to the thirteenth through fifteenth — and, more precisely, that the gap between a text's composition date and its oldest surviving copy is approximately exponentially distributed, yielding a measurable recopying half-life of roughly 100-150 years for the Sahelian paper book. The pre-1500 Sahel is thus almost entirely lost as OBJECT (true type-1 loss) while substantially preserved as TEXT — the exact inverse of a stone-inscription culture, and a case where a huge blank in the object record coexists with a full library in the text record. If it holds, 'medieval Timbuktu manuscript' almost always means a later copy, and physical-object arguments about the medieval city must be retired in favour of transmission-corrected ones.

Prediction clause (verbatim)

Primary clause: among vHMML Timbuktu items whose texts carry pre-1500 composition attributions, fewer than 2 percent of the physical copies date before 1550 by watermark or palaeography; secondary clause: the distribution of composition-to-oldest-copy gaps fits an exponential with half-life between 100 and 150 years (Kolmogorov-Smirnov test not rejecting). Killed if a substantial stratum of physically pre-1500 Sahel codices emerges, or the gap distribution is far from exponential.

Kill-dataset (verbatim)

vHMML African holdings — physical dating (watermarks, palaeography) against attributed composition dates.

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

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

That the Timbuktu collections are overwhelmingly later (16th-19th century) physical copies, that termites/humidity/brittleness destroyed paper books, and that texts survived through recopying are standard statements in the literature. The exponential composition-to-oldest-copy gap model with a 100-150 year half-life was not located.

Predictions

No prediction registered yet.

Weigh in

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