Handwriting Follows the Tribute Road

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)

Maya monuments name other sites — captures, overlordships, royal visits — which yields a political network; independently, glyphs show site-level formal variants, which yields a paleographic similarity network. The conjecture is that these are the same network: subordinate courts write like their overlords because scribes trained there, were sent from there, or copied books that came from there, so texts and text-makers moved along political edges. Paper is gone, but the handwriting it standardized is fossilized in stone, making the circulation system of lost manuscripts recoverable as a graph statistic. If the conjecture holds, paleographic distance becomes a proxy instrument for a vanished interlibrary system, and stylistic outlier courts flag polities outside the book trade — a map of textual isolation no chronicle records.

Prediction clause (verbatim)

Construct (a) the site-to-site mention network from monument texts and (b) a site-pair glyph-variant similarity matrix from site-assigned sign forms. Primary clause (the verdict follows it): politically linked site pairs show significantly higher paleographic similarity than unlinked pairs matched for geographic distance and time period (permutation test, p < 0.05). If geography alone absorbs the similarity structure, the circulation conjecture is dead.

Kill-dataset (verbatim)

Maya Hieroglyphic Database (MHD): site cross-references and site-level glyph-variant records supply both networks for the permutation test.

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

Maya political networks from monument mentions/emblem glyphs and paleographic transmission of sign forms through scribal training are both studied (Dumbarton Oaks 'Transmitting Change'; sociopolitical network analyses), but the explicit correlation test — politically linked site-pairs show higher paleographic similarity controlling for geography, as a proxy for a lost interlibrary circulation system — is un-run.

Predictions

No prediction registered yet.

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