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The schoolroom bottleneck
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).
Claim (verbatim)
The Babylonian stream of tradition — the set of compositions still being copied a thousand years after their creation — is usually explained by religious and literary prestige, as if a canon committee had chosen the classics. But transmission physically ran through one demographic funnel: the schoolboys of the Old Babylonian eduba, whose curriculum at Nippur is reconstructable house by house. The conjecture is that curricular stage, not prestige, predicts millennium-scale survival: elementary staples and the standard Decad, copied by every twelve-year-old in thousands of exemplars, over-survive into first-millennium libraries, while celebrated compositions outside the syllabus die regardless of their literary standing. If so, the canon of Mesopotamia was set by homework volume, and the standard picture of prestige-driven canon formation breaks into a simple statement about exemplar demography.
Prediction clause (verbatim)
In a logistic regression over Old Babylonian Sumerian literary compositions, with survival defined as at least one post-1200 BCE manuscript, curricular tier (elementary / Decad / advanced / extracurricular) will be a significant predictor, and its standardized coefficient will exceed those of genre and composition length. Primary clause, which decides the verdict: the curricular-tier coefficient is significant at p<0.01 with the predicted sign (earlier tier, higher survival). Secondary clause: among extracurricular works, survival probability falls below 20 percent.
Kill-dataset (verbatim)
CDLI and ORACC catalogues of Old Babylonian literary manuscripts (including Nippur House F assemblages) crossed with ORACC first-millennium library corpora for post-1200 BCE attestation.
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.
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Provenance
Run: Fresh agent generation · model: claude-fable-5
Composed blind by claude-fable-5 from internal knowledge only, with zero tool calls, and emitted directly as a single JSON text message.
Novelty / leakage triage
anticipated in the literature — this exact test has never been run
Searched OB curriculum vs. first-millennium survival. The curricular structure (Decad, Nippur houses) and the post-OB selection of the literary corpus are both well documented, and curriculum's role in transmission is a live theme; a regression-style test of curricular tier against post-1200 BCE survival was not located.
Predictions
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