The Sankore lag

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)

The Sankore lag. Technology-diffusion lag curves meet Timbuktu codicology: the Sahara's intellectual bandwidth tripled between 1400 and 1600, so the delay between a work's composition in the Islamic heartland and its first dated West African copy collapsed as the trans-Saharan book trade routinized.

Prediction clause (verbatim)

From dated colophons in the Timbuktu catalogues, the median composition-to-first-copy lag falls from >= 150 years for works composed before 1300 to <= 60 years for works composed 1450-1550, declining monotonically across composition cohorts, with the hazard of first West African copying roughly doubling per century of composition date; flat or rising lags kill it.

Kill-dataset (verbatim)

Kill: dated colophons in the IHERI-ABT (Ahmed Baba Institute) and Mamma Haidara catalogues, with composition dates from Brockelmann's Geschichte der arabischen Litteratur.

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/web/DB access); titles-only knowledge of existing items, embedded in titles_supplied per the batch-2 lane rule; prompt pre-committed in docs/GOAL_CONJECTURES_BATCH3_20260705.md (b043140). Novelty unverified by construction. titles_supplied stripped to the committed sidecar conjecture_fresh_fablemax_batch3_titles_supplied_20260705.md at import (schema additionalProperties:false; relaxation queued).

Novelty / leakage triage

Adjacent (closely related prior work exists)

The trans-Saharan book trade as a transmission network is the subject of a dedicated scholarly volume (Krätli & Lydon) and colophon dating data exists (HMML cataloguing); the composition-to-first-West-African-copy lag curve was not located, and the dossier surfaced a real confound (150-200-year recopying cycles from material decay) any resolution must address.

Krätli & Lydon (eds.), 'The Trans-Saharan Book Trade' (Brill) — The join's scholarly home, qualitative

Predictions

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