The Most-Wanted 52

Figlina scholarship (Helen, Setälä, Bodel) reads brick stamps for ownership and organization, while firm-size econophysics reads modern registries; neither community has had a reason to hand the other a dataset, so the Gibrat regression on stamp counts sits in the gap between epigraphy and industrial organization.

Kill route — Search the Oxford Roman Economy Project (OXREP) bibliography and working papers for 'firm size distribution' — if anyone has done this, it is the Wilson/Bowman quantitative-ancient-economy circle; failing that, one email to the CIL XV / Roman brickstamp community settles whether the regression exists in a Festschrift.

Instrument historians use engraved latitudes one astrolabe at a time, for dating and provenance; nobody in that catalogue-driven tradition has aggregated latitudes as a demand-side market signal, because the city-size estimates needed for the other half of the regression live in urban economic history, a field astrolabe scholars rarely visit.

Kill route — Query the Epact joint catalogue (Oxford HSM, British Museum, Museo Galileo) and David King's Frankfurt-school corpus of Islamic instruments for any aggregate latitude-frequency table; King's students index engraved latitudes exhaustively and would know within a day if the distribution has ever been plotted against anything.

Geniza scholars study writing materials and letter genres deeply but qualitatively; the price-elasticity framing requires treating letter length as a consumption quantity, an economist's move no philologist has had occasion to make on this corpus.

Kill route — Ask the Princeton Geniza Project data team directly — their structured metadata includes material and transcription length, so Marina Rustow's lab could confirm or kill the length-by-surface comparison in an afternoon, and would know if anyone already tried.

Thin-field discount: much of the relevant evidence sits in Francophone colonial-era reports (Bulletin de l'IFAN, military mission accounts) and Arabic chronicle scholarship that our search barely penetrates — a bar-weight tabulation could easily exist in a 1930s Dakar journal without leaving a trace in indexed databases.

Kill route — Ask Ghislaine Lydon and the trans-Saharan trade historians who work the caravan account books; the fastest documentary kill is her published Wad Nun and Timbuktu commercial records, which record bar weights transaction by transaction, plus the IFAN back catalogue.

Thin-field discount: southern African archaeometry is a small community and much site data lives in grey-literature excavation reports; more damningly, whether a usable corpus of plateau weight artifacts even exists is itself unestablished, so absence of the comparison may just be absence of the dataset.

Kill route — One email to Shadreck Chirikure's Cape Town lab asking whether excavated Zimbabwe-plateau weight artifacts exist in quantifiable numbers, and one to the Kilwa numismatists (the Perkins coin corpus; Wynne-Jones and Fleisher's circle) asking whether anyone has quantogrammed anything against the Kilwa standard.

Heaps' law lives in computational linguistics and CDLI transliterations live in Assyriology, and the small community that bridges them (cuneiform NLP) has focused on translation and lemmatization, not vocabulary-growth curves; the sharp historical edge — exponent collapse at Old Babylonian curricular standardization — requires knowing both Veldhuis' scribal-education work and corpus statistics, a rare pairing.

Kill route — Ask the cuneiform-NLP alumni (the MTAAC project circle and the CDLI Framework developers) whether a sign-inventory growth curve has been fit; if not, the CDLI transliterations are open and the fit is a weekend of code — the fastest overturn is simply doing it.

Benford's law is famous enough that someone should have tried this, which is precisely the reason to suspect they did and it failed the magnitude-span pre-check quietly; but Mycenaean epigraphy is a compact, well-indexed field and no digit-statistics paper surfaced, suggesting the audit framing genuinely never crossed the Aegean.

Kill route — Post the question to the Mycenological community (Aegeus society, the Aegean-l circuit) and grep the DĀMOS and LiBER digital Linear B corpora literature; a first-digit histogram from the Knossos series is a one-day computation, and the fatal magnitude-span check should be run before anything else.

Qanat mapping (remote sensing), qanat water law (institutional history), and well-interference hydraulics (groundwater engineering) are three literatures with three publication venues and no shared conferences; the spacing-versus-drawdown test needs all three at once, which is why the join plausibly sat unmade.

Kill route — Ask the International Center on Qanats and Historic Hydraulic Structures in Yazd — Iranian qanat engineering scholarship, partly in Persian, is where a spacing rule-of-thumb would have been written down; in parallel, check the CORONA-imagery qanat-detection groups (Casana's lab lineage) for any nearest-neighbor statistics in their supplements.

Roman camp studies measure dimensional accuracy and celebrate the grid; materials physics catalogues lattice defects; the metaphor is obvious enough that its absence is surprising, but defect-density-as-classifier requires digitizing street grids from geophysics plans, a labor nobody has had a physics-shaped reason to perform.

Kill route — Ask the romanarmy.eu collective (Menéndez Blanco and colleagues), who hold hundreds of newly detected Iberian camp plans and would know instantly whether anyone has scored grid defects; their corpus is also the cheapest place to run the marching-camp-versus-fort classification.

Thin-field discount: campanology is an antiquarian literature scattered across county-society transactions and foundry archives that indexing barely touches — a founding-pitch geography could exist in a Dutch or German carillon monograph and our search would never see it.

Kill route — The Dutch National Carillon Museum at Asten holds André Lehr's archive of measured bell pitches — the one shelf where a pitch-geography study would live; ask there and the tower-bell measurement community (Hibbert's UK bell-acoustics database) before believing the join is unmade.

Naval architects know the pitching-resonance physics and maritime archaeologists know the wreck dimensions, but the selection-environment framing — seas as evolutionary filters on hull length — belongs to neither discipline's normal question set, and wave-climatology data good enough for the test is itself recent.

Kill route — Put the question to the ISBSA community (International Symposium on Boat and Ship Archaeology), where the rare people fluent in both hydrodynamics and wreck catalogues congregate; the Swedish Fornsök and Baltic wreck registers plus ERA5 wave spectra make the deficit test directly computable.

3D wear quantification matured in lithic microwear labs, and pilgrimage economics lives in ecclesiastical account-book history; the threshold as an unfalsifiable footfall counter needs both, plus scanning campaigns nobody has funded, so the calibration against offering receipts plausibly remains unattempted.

Kill route — Search heritage-science venues for stair-wear quantification (the Scala Santa and cathedral-step conservation reports are where a pilot would hide), then ask Compostela-route historians which fabric accounts and indulgence registers survive in ranked-comparable form — the documentary half is the harder half and its keepers would know of any prior attempt.

Mortar scientists section historic mortars for dating and provenance, not for internal seasonal stratigraphy, and Swahili archaeologists have had no reason to expect tree-ring logic inside a wall; the conjecture imports an increment-archive concept from dendrochronology into a materials literature that reads mortar as a single event.

Kill route — Ask Stephanie Wynne-Jones and Jeffrey Fleisher whether Kilwa mortar thin-sections from the Chittick-era and recent excavations (British Institute in Eastern Africa archives) show any layering, and put the banding question to the mortar-dating community at its MODIS conference — the people who section lime mortars daily can kill this from existing slides.

The Assembly Project mapped thing-site topography and archaeoacoustics built the modelling toolkit, but the two ran in the same decade without intersecting; the suspicion about Thingvellir's cliffs is centuries old, which makes the absence of a single intelligibility model genuinely strange and possibly just a matter of nobody having pressed compute.

Kill route — Ask Sarah Semple's Assembly Project alumni and the archaeoacoustics community (Rupert Till's circle) whether any thing site has been acoustically modelled; if not, open-source outdoor-propagation tools plus Icelandic lidar terrain make Thingvellir-versus-controls a single funded master's thesis.

The Porticus Minucia's 45 bays are in the topographical literature and Erlang's formulas are in every operations textbook, but Roman historians do not model queues and operations researchers do not read Coarelli; the arithmetic requires no new data, which paradoxically means no discipline ever owned it.

Kill route — This is the cheapest kill on the list: run the multi-server calculation against Rickman's grain-supply figures and the Porticus Minucia topography and publish the number — utilisation far outside 0.6-0.95 overturns it, and any ancient-economy seminar can referee the service-time assumptions.

Indus metrologists have documented the denomination series to fractions of a percent, and Bachet's problem is solved mathematics, but combinatorial-optimality scoring of an archaeological weight series is a question from neither archaeology nor number theory; the join needed someone to see a 4,000-year-old artifact list as a candidate solution to a 17th-century puzzle.

Kill route — Check whether Kenoyer's or Bhan's weight-corpus publications, or any Indus metrology review, ever score the series against an efficiency criterion; if not, the optimal sets are an afternoon of integer programming against the published denominations, and the Harappan metrology community can immediately referee whether the attested series is complete.

Pacific navigation ethnography (Lewis, Gladwin, the Taumako work) is rich but pre-quantitative about wind statistics, and the reanalysis datasets that make wind constancy computable everywhere arrived decades after the ethnographic questions fossilized; the adaptationist comparison across societies was never possible until the meteorology caught up.

Kill route — Ask the Pacific navigation community — the Vaka Taumako Project circle and Ben Finney's intellectual descendants — whether anyone has crossed compass-system typology with wind climatology; the ethnographic classification exists in Lewis's We, the Navigators and the ERA5 constancy ratios are a day of computation.

Slavin's cattle-plague scholarship and the dated-manuscript catalogues matured in separate corners of medieval studies — environmental history and codicology — and the lag-structure framing (parchment as a livestock derivative with delivery delay) is a commodities-market idea neither field would naturally reach for.

Kill route — Count dated manuscripts in Watson's and the Manuscrits datés catalogues for NW Europe 1310-1335 against the 1319-21 murrain and send the plot to Philip Slavin and Bruce Campbell — the two people who would know instantly whether the parchment-supply channel has been claimed anywhere in the murrain literature.

Computus scholars know the columns are mutually derivable and coding theorists know what redundancy does to error rates, but the error-correcting-code reading of Easter tables requires treating scribal corrections as data, and the computus community's editions log errors without classifying columns by checkability.

Kill route — Ask Immo Warntjes and the Galway-Trinity computus conference circle — their collations of the Bede-tradition tables already record errors and corrections apparatus-by-apparatus, so the checkable-versus-free column comparison is extractable from editions that exist, and they would know if anyone has framed it.

Honest discount: colophon scholarship is vast, multilingual, and largely uncorpused — Armenian, Syriac, Georgian, and Ethiopic colophon studies each have deep national-language literatures our search skims at best, and a correlation of apology formulae with copying quality could exist in any of them; the signaling-theory framing is likely new, the empirical observation possibly not.

Kill route — Cross Sanjian's translated Armenian colophons with the variant apparatus of any collated Armenian gospel tradition for a fast pilot, and ask the Syriac digital-humanities circle (Penn's manuscript projects) and the AIEA Armenian codicologists whether formula-versus-accuracy has ever been tabulated in the national-language literatures.

Colophon dates are used to place manuscripts in time, not in the agricultural year; the monastic-versus-urban seasonal-amplitude index is a labor-economics question, and quantitative codicology's flagship datasets were built by scholars asking about production totals, not work calendars.

Kill route — Ask Malachi Beit-Arié's SfarData team first — the Hebrew dated-manuscript database has structured month fields and its builders have run every distribution imaginable, so they can confirm or kill the seasonality claim over coffee before anyone touches the Armenian and Syriac corpora.

Species-area scaling is ecology's export product and multigraphism is a qualitative subfield of writing-systems research; the enabling dataset (the Global Script Database with its phylogenetic edges) is brand new, so the question literally could not have been asked quantitatively until after the qualitative literature had already settled its framings.

Kill route — Ask the Global Script Database team whether any scaling analysis is in their pipeline, then compute the single most diagnostic point first: Dunhuang's residual from a gravity-model fit — if the most famous multigraphic site on earth towers above the curve, the law dies in one figure.

Arabization is studied as qualitative periodization (Papaconstantinou and the Leiden school) while logistic-diffusion fitting lives in language-dynamics physics; papyrology is superbly indexed, so the absence of a per-region steepness comparison probably reflects a genuine gap between the sociolinguistic question and the papyrological database that can now answer it.

Kill route — One email to Petra Sijpesteijn's Leiden group (Embedding Conquest), who hold exactly the dated, placed, language-tagged documentary corpus this test needs and would know if any regional logistic fitting exists in the dissertation pipeline; otherwise papyri.info metadata makes the fits a week's work.

Distance-decay models of language shift exist in modern sociolinguistics and single-site language-choice studies exist in papyrology, but regressing log-odds on river-kilometres requires joining findspot gazetteers to a language field at corpus scale — infrastructure that Trismegistos only recently made trivial, long after the bilingualism debates set their terms.

Kill route — Ask Mark Depauw's Trismegistos team in Leuven — TM holds language, date, and geocoded findspot for hundreds of thousands of texts and could run the gradient in days; they are also the people most likely to know of any buried prior attempt in the Leuven-Cologne papyrological orbit.

The DBBE is young and its own team has announced pattern analyses as future work, so the age-versus-popularity test sits in the short window between a database's creation and its creators getting around to the obvious questions; the anti-preferential-attachment framing additionally requires cultural-evolution nulls that Byzantinists do not routinely carry.

Kill route — Email the DBBE team in Ghent (Demoen's and Bernard's circle) and ask what is in their analysis pipeline — this is their data and they may already have the Spearman computed; if unclaimed, their type-and-occurrence export makes the test a single day of work.

The constant-hazard result exists for modern firms (Daepp et al.) and scriptorium lifespans are discussed anecdotally, but survival analysis has never been run on manuscript-production places because the multi-tradition catalogue aggregation (vHMML) that defines the population only recently exists in queryable form.

Kill route — Ask HMML's metadata team (Columba Stewart's operation) about date density per tradition, then run Kaplan-Meier on their places — and cross-check the Latin West against Buringh's production-place database, whose builder thought hardest about exactly the censoring problems that could fake an exponential.

The raw genre shares are published — one CDLI-derived dataset even reports the 93.6% Ur III administrative figure — so the ingredients are lying in the open; what appears unclaimed is only the entropy formalization and the within-collection replication design, an information-theory dressing Assyriology has not needed.

Kill route — The computation is free: CDLI catalogue genres by period are downloadable and the entropy is one line of code; the real kill is refereeing by the Assyriological DH community (the Veldhuis-lineage corpus projects), who can say whether the Ur III genre skew is record or recovery — and whether anyone has said 'entropy' about it before.

Honest discount: heqin scholarship in Chinese is enormous and quantitative tabulations of tribute quantities exist at least since Yü Ying-shih's Trade and Expansion in Han China — the regression framing on victim-instability may be new, but a Chinese-language study correlating tribute escalation with Han court politics could easily exist beyond our search's reach.

Kill route — Start from Yü Ying-shih's tabulations, which may already imply the answer, then run the CNKI search in Chinese for heqin quantity studies and ask Han economic historians (the Cambridge History of China chapter lineage) whether tribute-escalation timing has been regressed on anything.

The finance concept is textbook and the papyrological geography is computable, but 'concentration of survival under contraction' is a question neither papyrologists (who study places one at a time) nor financial economists (who have never heard of a nome) would pose; the search returned literally zero hits on the papyrological side.

Kill route — The Herfindahl-per-bin computation is a script against papyri.info dates and places; the substantive kill is the findspot-versus-writing-place confound, so send the result to the Trismegistos team, whose provenance expertise decides whether concentration measures administration retreating or sebakh-diggers digging.

Taylor's law has been transplanted to crime, epidemics, finance, and prime numbers — Cohen's survey catalogues the sightings — but never to documentary survival, plausibly because the fluctuation-scaling community trawls for time series and nobody handed them a papyrological one.

Kill route — Compute the slope from papyri.info (in-house, an afternoon), then send it to Joel Cohen himself, who maintains the census of Taylor's-law appearances and can say in one reply whether archaeological survival data has ever been fit — and whether the excavation-clustering confound sinks the interpretation.

Pinakes and DBBE share a Diktyon identifier backbone but belong to different scholarly tribes (Greek manuscript cataloguing versus Byzantine epigram studies), and the rescaled-collapse test is a statistical-physics move; the corpora have simply never been laid on the same axes.

Kill route — Request the works-by-witness-count distribution from the IRHT Pinakes team and run the Corral-Deluca exponent-equality test against DBBE type-group sizes — both datasets are in hand here, so the fastest overturn is either a prior claim known to IRHT or the collapse simply failing on first plot.

Factor models are the most standard tool in empirical finance and the multi-tradition production series became assemblable only when HMML's cataloguing unified Syriac, Armenian, Coptic, Ethiopic, and Georgian metadata; the PCA has plausibly never been run because the matrix never previously existed in one place.

Kill route — The decisive confound is that vHMML date density reflects cataloguing campaigns, not medieval history — ask HMML's metadata team which traditions have real dated-manuscript coverage 800-1500 before fitting anything; a first component driven by digitization waves kills the finding, not the conjecture, and they alone can tell the difference.

Demixing is a live topic in soft-matter physics and multi-tradition centres like St. Catherine's are individually famous, but the distributional question — is the mixing spectrum bimodal? — requires place-level composition statistics across traditions that only the unified vHMML catalogue makes computable.

Kill route — Hartigan's dip test is one line of R against vHMML places; the vulnerable joint is that 'place' fields often record modern repository rather than medieval scriptorium, so the overturn route is a HMML cataloguer confirming that the pure-place majority is an artifact of collection-level provenance coding.

Honest discount: the Kugyō bunin is a printed, heavily-worked source and Japanese court-prosopography scholarship is enormous and almost entirely in Japanese — promotion-wait tabulations by lineage very plausibly exist in kokushigaku journals our search cannot see; the priority-queueing formalism is likely the only genuinely new layer.

Kill route — Post the question to the PMJS (Premodern Japanese Studies) listserv and search CiNii in Japanese for Kugyō bunin promotion-interval studies; a Heian prosopographer can likely name a tabulated precedent — or its absence — within a week.

Honest discount: caoyun scholarship in Chinese and Japanese is a mature field — Hoshi Ayao's own tabulations are the proposed kill dataset — and a variance or fluctuation analysis of tribute arrivals could exist in CNKI-indexed journals invisible to our search; the supply-chain-theory framing is probably new, the variance observation possibly not.

Kill route — Search CNKI for quantitative caoyun studies and ask Ming economic historians in the Brook lineage whether anyone has compared arrival variance to disbursement variance; Hoshi's tables plus the Da Ming Huidian granary records make the CV ratio computable by anyone with the Japanese and the patience.

Honest discount: leishu source criticism is a vast Sinological subfield in Chinese and Japanese, and while no work proposing within-juan positional bias was located even qualitatively, quotation-position observations could hide in Kyoto-school philological commentary that keyword search cannot reach; the format-dependence mechanism does appear genuinely un-proposed.

Kill route — Ask the leishu quotation-studies community (Taiping yulan source-criticism specialists) directly, and in parallel just run it: Yiwen leiju and Taiping yulan are on Kanripo alongside the Shiji and Wenxuan source texts, so the decile-position histogram is scriptable without new data.

Islamic art history discusses frontispiece pair asymmetry as theology or as triumph over difficulty — interpretive registers that never generate a signed, corpus-level precision statistic; the execution-order reading requires blinded geometric scoring, a forensic method the field has not imported.

Kill route — Score the strapwork grids of the fully digitized Sultan Baybars Qur'an (BL Add MS 22406-22412) blind, then ask the Islamic geometric-design specialists (the circle around the Khalili catalogues and Sheila Blair's students) whether a consistent weaker side has ever been remarked — they would know if the observation exists even as connoisseurship.

Mixtec codicology documents the guide lines and boustrophedon order in detail but reads spacing iconographically, not metrically; the planning-horizon concept comes from papyrological line-justification studies, a literature Mesoamericanists have no reason to read, so the transfer plausibly never happened.

Kill route — Measure inter-figure spacing on the British Museum's Zouche-Nuttall scans (Am1902,0308.1) — the data is public and the compression test needs no permission; then ask the Leiden school of Mixtec studies (Jansen's students) whether end-of-register crowding has been noted qualitatively in the facsimile commentaries.

Honest discount: much khachkar scholarship is in Armenian and the dated-inscription corpora are barely digitized, so the counter-cyclical claim is untested partly because the join is hard to see from outside the language; notably, the located literature reads the two series as co-varying with prosperity — the opposite sign — which makes this either genuinely new or straightforwardly wrong.

Kill route — An Armenian-reading collaborator tabulating dated inscriptions from the Divan hay vimagrutʿyan volumes against Sanjian's colophon counts settles it; the AIEA Armenian-studies community and the RAA monument documentation project are the two doors to knock on, and the prevailing co-variation reading gives the overturn a running start.

Library historians reconstruct shelf orders and citation scholars build co-citation networks, but the causal arrow from furniture to footnotes belongs to neither: the retrieval-prior mechanism is cognitive-science reasoning applied to a twelfth-century armarium, and the Saint-Victor reconstruction that makes it testable is itself recent digital work.

Kill route — Ask the medieval library-catalogue community — the CBMLC editors' circle (Willoughby and colleagues) and the Saint-Victor reconstruction team behind the Grandrue digitization — whether shelf-adjacency has ever been proposed as a citation predictor; the co-citation side is computable now from Brepols' Library of Latin Texts for Hugh and Richard.

Honest discount: Aksumite epigraphy is a literature of perhaps a few dozen active scholars, so absence of the proclamation-technology account is weak evidence — though the catalogued explanations (scripture, Indian influence, pronunciation preservation) are few enough that a fourth would likely have been visible if published.

Kill route — The corpus is tiny: the RIÉ (Recueil des inscriptions de l'Éthiopie) transition-window inscriptions number a few dozen, so one email to Alessandro Bausi's Hamburg Beta maṣāḥǝft team both checks for priors and, with genre and vocalization fields, effectively runs the test.

Honest discount: Ethiopic computus scholarship essentially fits on one shelf — Neugebauer plus a handful of successors — so no error-typology study existing means almost nothing about whether the idea has occurred to someone; this is low locatability in one of the thinnest fields on the list.

Kill route — Ask the two or three living specialists in the Baḥrä ḥassab tradition (via Bausi's Hamburg centre) whether numeral-error typology has been examined; the EMML microfilm computus manuscripts are the shelf, and a pilot collation of a dozen witnesses would decide the shape-versus-arithmetic question.

Honest discount: Ethiopian colophon statistics barely exist as a genre, so the unlocated status of era-choice-as-network-marker measures the field's size, not the idea's originality; the adjacent Coptic era studies show the raw observation is natural once anyone counts.

Kill route — Denis Nosnitsin's Ethio-SPaRe project mapped exactly the monastic networks in question with manuscript-level provenance — one email to him or Ted Erho could confirm from field notes whether era habits track filiation, or point to an Amharic-language study that already says so.

Honest discount: West African paratext statistics are a very thin literature and much manuscript documentation sits in uncatalogued private libraries, so the unclaimed status of the endowment-colophon correlation mostly reflects that nobody has counted anything yet; the deed-of-the-donated-book mechanism is the plausibly original part.

Kill route — Charles Stewart's AMMS database (the West African Arabic manuscript union catalogue at Illinois) has ownership-mark and content fields — ask Stewart and Dmitry Bondarev's Hamburg group whether colophon incidence has ever been cross-tabulated with waqf statements; the relative-risk computation is trivial once the fields are confirmed.

Honest discount: quantitative colophon work for the Sahel is nearly nonexistent, so an unclaimed seasonality finding is weak evidence of novelty — and the seasonal rhythm of scholarly life is likely oral knowledge among manuscript families in Timbuktu that no one has needed to publish; the lunar-precession control is the genuinely sharp addition.

Kill route — Ask the Timbuktu manuscript community — SAVAMA-DCI's cataloguers and Stewart's AMMS circle — whether completion-date seasonality is known folklore, then run the Rayleigh test on converted dates from the vHMML Sahel collections; the lunar-to-solar control makes the result self-refereeing.

Honest discount: Swahili manuscript-provenance statistics are thin and unevenly accessible, so the unlocated status is weak evidence; the substantive novelty claim is narrower — the standard reading attributes the northern concentration to literary preeminence, and no located work quantifies it as a survival artifact against the epigraphic map.

Kill route — Compute the two concentration indices — SOAS Swahili Manuscripts Database provenance fields against the pre-1500 inscription-bearing site lists in Horton's and Pradines' coastal archaeology — and send the ratio to the Bayreuth Swahili-philology group (Vierke's circle), who can say whether the archive-continuity reading already circulates unpublished.

Assyriologists discuss archive death and file-culling qualitatively, and month-resolved dates fill BDTNS, but forensic use of terminal-month distributions as a destruction detector is an idea from survival forensics that the archival-practice literature (the Veenhof-tradition archive studies) never formalized statistically.

Kill route — Query BDTNS for final-year month distributions of the big Ur III archives whose ends are independently understood (Umma at the collapse, Drehem's wind-down) — Manuel Molina's database makes it days of work, and the cuneiform-archives community can immediately name any prior terminal-date analysis if one exists.

Envelopes-as-tamper-proofing is standard doctrine, but modeling envelope probability on counterparty familiarity requires prosopographic pair-matching across thousands of contracts — network-scale data work that Old Babylonian legal history has described qualitatively but never regressed.

Kill route — One email to Dominique Charpin's Archibab team, who hold envelope status, parties, and witnesses in structured form and constitute the entire relevant refereeing community; the lurking overturn is taphonomic — envelope survival varies by excavation — and only they can say whether the familiarity signal survives a site control.

Score editions quantify witnesses and variants composition by composition, but correlating variant rate with exemplar density across compositions — canonization as convergence, not editorship — imports an error-correction mechanism from information theory into a debate Assyriology has conducted entirely in terms of named redactors.

Kill route — The electronic Babylonian Library in Munich is precisely this dataset — variant registers across exemplars at corpus scale — so one email to Enrique Jiménez's team either finds the correlation already computed in their pipeline or gets it computed; no other route is faster.

Tenure survival analysis has been run on popes and modern executives, and Ur III prosopography is rich, but the two never met: prosopographers compile careers to identify individuals, not to fit hazard functions, and the constitutional inference (no terms, no seniority) is a question the field has not thought to ask a histogram.

Kill route — BDTNS attestation spans for Umma, Girsu, and Drehem title-holders make the Weibull fit direct; the overturn lives in the censoring — last attestation is not exit — so put the result to the Ur III prosopographers (Molina, Dahl and the BPOA/Nisaba circle), who alone can judge whether attestation gaps fake memorylessness.

Sealing practice and witness lists are described city by city in the legal-document literature, but fitting formality probability against silver value — and claiming a cross-city stable threshold, an unwritten statute — is a law-and-economics move that Old Babylonian legal history, organized philologically by site and genre, has not made.

Kill route — Archibab again holds values, sealing status, and witness counts; before fitting, ask the Old Babylonian legal historians in the Charpin and Westbrook traditions whether a value-formality tabulation exists in a site monograph — this is the item most likely to have a buried partial precedent in a German-language dissertation.

Englund himself analyzed arithmetic discrepancies in Ur III accounts, so the raw phenomenon is published; what appears unclaimed is only the forensic-accounting question — the direction of error relative to institutional interest — a signed test nobody ran because Assyriology read the errors as competence evidence, not incentive evidence.

Kill route — Reread Englund's discrepancy studies (JESHO and CDLJ) first — if the directional tally exists anywhere, it is in his footnotes; failing that, BDTNS full transliterations from Umma and Girsu permit recomputation, and 200 signed discrepancies plus a binomial test settle it either way.