The Scriptome
What survives, what was lost, what was written — region by region, century by century.
How many manuscripts did the pre-print world produce? The columns below stand on what survives; the water is what was lost; the estimates are inferences, with their assumptions on the ledger.
The full time spine
Every period from the earliest cuneiform tablets to the 19th century. Chartered periods below are the census-grounded map you see further down this page; ancient periods carry no census-grade cell in this default view — that absence is real, not a gap in the page, and the Ancient World lens above is where those centuries are actually estimated.
Provenance legend
Every cell on the map below carries one of these five provenance classes. Click through any region for the full ledger.
integrated_promoted
A production estimate fitted directly for this exact region/period/tradition cell.
pooled_group_prior
Too little direct evidence for this cell alone; shrunk toward a wider group's shared prior, honestly labeled as borrowed.
triangulated
Two or more independent methods agree or disagree on this cell; the band reflects that agreement or divergence.
census_only
A real catalogued count exists, but no production estimate has been fitted for it yet -- a floor, not a band.
terra
No calibrated cell exists here at all: absence is labeled, never silently skipped.
Four-quadrant accounting
Every cell on the map is, in principle, split into what is known to survive, what may survive uncatalogued, what is known to be destroyed by name, and what is only inferred lost. Hover any column below for its own reading; the honest current state, project-wide, is this:
The census count. Real on every rendered cell.
Not yet computed at this exact cell grain anywhere in the project; the capture–recapture lane exists at tradition scale on the methods page.
Not yet computed at this exact cell grain; the title-loss lane exists at tradition scale for 11 traditions (see methods).
The submerged water below. Real wherever a cell has a canonical estimate, absent where it is census-only.
Legend
- Land above water: extant catalogue substrate.
- Submerged column: estimated lost mass, never noetic-only.
- Region inferred from language, not recorded origin.
- Latin West
- Hebrew
- Armenian
- Georgian
- Syriac
- Coptic
- Ethiopic
- Islamic world
- Chinese
- Tibetan
- Khotanese
- Uyghur
- Sogdian
- Sanskrit
- Extant count height bands: 0, <1, <5, <20, <100, >=100 on a log-ish scale.
- Submerged depth is estimated lost mass; opacity rises with sensitivity-envelope width.