Scribal Arithmetic Under Two Suns

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)

Medieval computus — the Easter-reckoning literature — offers historians a rare gift: tables whose internal arithmetic can be checked, yielding measured scribal error rates per copied operation. Classic Maya monuments offer the same gift in stone: a Long Count date, its Calendar Round equivalent, and often a lunar series must all be mutually consistent, so every dated monument is a self-auditing arithmetic exercise. I conjecture that running the computus error-audit on the Maya corpus will show a per-date internal-inconsistency rate significantly lower than the per-entry error rate of Latin computus tables — because carving errors into public, permanent, politically charged stone imposed a proofreading discipline that a monastery's working parchment did not. The mechanism is the cost of error: correction costs on stone are enormous and public, so verification effort scales up, exactly as error-cost theory predicts. If this holds, we obtain a cross-cultural measurement of how medium and audience discipline scribal accuracy, with the counterintuitive result that the most reliable computational scribes of the Middle Ages worked in the Americas.

Prediction clause (verbatim)

The internal-inconsistency rate among Maya monumental dates with redundant calendrical information will be below 1% per date, while the per-entry arithmetical error rate in a comparison sample of Latin computus tables will exceed 3%. Primary clause (the verdict follows it): the Maya rate is lower than the Latin rate, significant by a two-proportion test at p < 0.05. Secondary clauses: the absolute <1% and >3% thresholds.

Kill-dataset (verbatim)

The Maya Hieroglyphic Database (calendrical records module) with published computus-table error surveys as the Latin comparator; kill is a statistical test (two-proportion comparison of error rates).

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

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

Maya epigraphers routinely identify individual calendrical recording errors and computus error audits exist on the Latin side, so both instrument halves are established, but no corpus-wide Maya internal-inconsistency rate nor any cross-cultural two-proportion comparison with computus tables was located.

Predictions

No prediction registered yet.

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