AI-generated conjecture · below the evidence/publication boundary

The intercalation detector

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)

Two well-known things: Mesopotamian calendars were kept lunar by ad hoc royal insertion of a thirteenth month, and the Ur III depot at Puzrish-Dagan (Drehem) logged livestock deliveries day by day for decades. The conjecture joins them: the intercalation decision left a signature in the delivery stream, because festival-driven deliveries were scheduled against the civil month, so in intercalated years the flow of sheep and oxen around the great festivals bunches and shifts in a measurable way — and the shape of the shift reveals how much advance notice the provinces actually received. If it holds, the livestock ledger doubles as a record of calendar politics, answering from animal arithmetic a question no royal inscription answers: whether the empire planned its leap months or improvised them at the last moment.

Prediction clause (verbatim)

In Drehem texts, the distribution of delivery volumes by day within festival months will differ significantly between intercalated and non-intercalated years (Kolmogorov-Smirnov or permutation test on day-of-month profiles). Primary clause, which decides the verdict: the intercalated-versus-normal difference in festival-month delivery profiles is significant at p<0.01 pooled over the well-attested years of Shulgi 40 to Ibbi-Suen 2. Secondary clause: delivery anomalies concentrate in the month or two immediately before the inserted month, indicating a late-announced decision.

Kill-dataset (verbatim)

BDTNS (day-dated Drehem delivery texts, with the Ur III intercalation record derivable from its date formulas).

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

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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 Drehem deliveries, festivals, and intercalation. Sallaberger (Der kultische Kalender der Ur III-Zeit, 1993) ties Drehem deliveries to the festival calendar and Ur III intercalation is reconstructed city by city, but no use of delivery-stream statistics to detect the timing/notice of intercalation decisions was located.

Predictions

No prediction registered yet.

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