The Katun Wheel Remembers the Chronicles

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)

The Paris Codex carries a sequence of pages organized by the katun, the twenty-year period that also structures history-telling in the colonial Yucatec Books of Chilam Balam; the usual observation connects those two and stops. The structural conjecture goes further: the Paris katun pages are a compressed fossil of the lost historical-book genre, so their glyphic vocabulary should lean measurably toward the monuments' dynastic register — period-ending, accession, and event formulas — and away from the almanac register that dominates the Dresden and Madrid pages. The mechanism is refugee formulas: when a genre dies, its skeleton takes shelter inside a surviving genre, and the katun count was the chronicle's spine, so priests kept the chronicle's frame inside the divinatory calendar. If the conjecture holds, we can read the outline of the burned historical books off the one surviving book-section that descends from them.

Prediction clause (verbatim)

Build sign and lexeme frequency profiles for (a) the Paris Codex katun pages, (b) the Dresden and Madrid almanac pages, and (c) the pooled monumental corpus. Primary clause (the verdict follows it): the distributional distance from the Paris katun-page profile to the monumental profile is significantly smaller than the distance from the Dresden/Madrid almanac profiles to the monumental profile, controlling for sample length by bootstrap. If the Paris katun pages profile with the almanacs, the fossil claim is dead.

Kill-dataset (verbatim)

Maya Hieroglyphic Database (MHD): page-level codex sign records and the monumental corpus supply the three frequency profiles for the distance comparison.

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 in a single blind Write by claude-fable-5 with no reads, greps, web access, database queries, or any other tool calls; all content produced from model-internal knowledge under the W18 hard blankness protocol.

Novelty / leakage triage

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

The Paris Codex katun pages and their link to the katun-structured Books of Chilam Balam histories are standard (Love, 'The Paris Codex: Handbook for a Maya Priest'), and the Chilam Balam are recognized descendants of lost hieroglyphic chronicles — but the quantitative test that the katun pages' glyphic profile leans toward the monumental dynastic register vs the almanac register is un-run.

Bruce Love, 'The Paris Codex: Handbook for a Maya Priest'
'Reevaluating Chronology and Historical Content in the Maya Books of Chilam Balam', ResearchGate 274080317

Predictions

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