AI-generated conjecture · below the evidence/publication boundary

Bottomry break-even

Status: Prior

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)

Bottomry break-even. Joins actuarial insurance pricing to maritime archaeology: fourth-century BCE Athenian bottomry rates were risk-priced to break even, so the loss probability implied by loan spreads must match the wreck rate implied by the archaeological record, two completely independent instruments reading the same hazard.

Prediction clause (verbatim)

Attested bottomry premia (12.5-30% per voyage in the Demosthenic corpus) over the land-secured lending benchmark imply a per-voyage total-loss probability of 8-20% on the long routes (Pontus, Sicily); an independent estimate from dated Aegean-route shipwreck counts, survival-corrected and divided by voyage-volume proxies (Athenian grain-import needs of roughly 500-1,000 shiploads per year), will land within a factor of 2 of the loan-implied band, i.e. between 4% and 40%, never outside.

Kill-dataset (verbatim)

Kill: the Strauss/Parker Mediterranean shipwreck database crossed with attested Demosthenic loan terms and standard grain-fleet estimates. Independent loss-rate estimates differing by more than x4 kill it.

Provenance

Run: Fresh agent generation · model: claude-fable-5

Generated by a fresh Fable-tier instance at maximum effort with generation-first blindness (no repo reads, no searches, no DB queries); title list supplied at launch, titles only, no verdicts or dossiers seen; prompt pre-committed in docs/GOAL_CONJECTURES_BATCH2_20260705.md (7e55eb8). Novelty unverified by construction.

Novelty / leakage triage

Leaked (already exists in the literature)

The actuarial reading of bottomry is the established historiographical interpretation — de Ste. Croix's 'marine insurance in the costume of credit', with rates seasonally and route-indexed — which is the conjecture's core. The cross-check against wreck-derived loss rates was not located, and a commonly repeated informal ~3% per-voyage loss figure sits below the conjecture's implied band — a tension any resolution must engage.

de Ste. Croix's bottomry-as-insurance reading (summarized in 'The Law of Averages') — The established actuarial interpretation

Predictions

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