Bestsellers of the Sahel

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)

Byzantinists can rank ancient Greek works by popularity because Pinakes counts surviving copies: a few texts survive in hundreds of manuscripts while most survive in one, and the shape of that concentration is a signature of the copying economy. The manuscript libraries of Timbuktu and the wider West African Sahel have now been catalogued in tens of thousands of records, but they are mined for individual treasures rather than profiled as a distribution. I conjecture that copies-per-work concentration in the West African Arabic corpus is measurably steeper than in the Byzantine Greek corpus — a madrasa-canon effect, because Sahelian copying was driven by a tight teaching curriculum (a small set of legal, grammatical, and devotional texts copied endlessly by students) rather than by patronage or library-building. The mechanism is curriculum-locked demand: when copying is pedagogy, the head of the distribution fattens and the tail thins. If this holds, the shape of a manuscript culture's copy-count curve becomes a readout of its educational structure, and the Sahel emerges as the most curriculum-driven copying economy yet measured.

Prediction clause (verbatim)

The Gini coefficient of copies-per-work computed over catalogued West African Arabic manuscripts will exceed the Gini coefficient of copies-per-work for classical and patristic Greek texts in Pinakes by at least 0.10. Primary clause (the verdict follows it): Gini(West African corpus) - Gini(Pinakes Greek corpus) >= 0.10, significant at p < 0.05 under bootstrap resampling. Secondary clause: the top 20 works account for at least 40% of all West African copies.

Kill-dataset (verbatim)

The West African Arabic Manuscript Database (AMMS/WAAMD) and vHMML West African collections, versus Pinakes copy counts; kill is a statistical test (bootstrap comparison of Gini coefficients).

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 with zero tool use, emitted as a single JSON text message per the fresh-lane blindness protocol.

Novelty / leakage triage

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

Hall & Stewart's core-curriculum reconstruction from ~21,000 West African manuscripts and Stewart's 31-library survey already quantify curriculum-driven concentration of copying, anticipating the claim's substance; the specific Gini-coefficient comparison against Pinakes Greek copy counts is un-run.

Predictions

No prediction registered yet.

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