One Thousand and One Conjectures

A palimpsest preserves, under its visible text, an older book that someone decided to scrape and reuse. This conjecture says the victims were not random and not doctrinally targeted: they were the administratively orphaned — works whose authors had no institutional afterlife,…

A rubbish mound is not a random sample of a town's writing; it is a sample of what the town decided was finished. Roman-Egyptian documents had legal lifetimes — a loan receipt mattered until repayment plus a dispute window, a lease until…

Ptolemaic papyri largely survive because dead documents were recycled into mummy casings — which means the Ptolemaic documentary record was filtered through the funerary industry's paper procurement, not through history. Cartonnage workshops bought discarded office paper in bulk lots decades after writing,…

When a household reused an obsolete document's back for a new text, it timestamped its own wastepaper basket: the interval between a dated recto and a dated verso measures how long ordinary people kept dead paper before recycling it. This retention time…

University loan chests took books in pawn, and the surviving cautio registers record what students and masters could stand to lose for a term; this conjecture joins pawnbroking economics to library history, claiming the pledge record is a photographic negative of the…

Everything we know statistically about dated Hebrew manuscripts flows through colophons, and colophons live in the most dangerous real estate in a codex: the final leaves, first to be lost to wear, damp, and detached quires. Dated manuscripts are therefore not a…

Binders wanted large, stiff sheets of parchment for covers, spine-linings, and pastedowns, so the recycling channel did not sample the Hebrew book population evenly: a large-format Bible or Talmud yields useful sheets, a pocket prayer book yields little worth the knife. The…

The Cairo Geniza is routinely treated as an unfiltered mirror of medieval life — whatever paper a community produced supposedly ended up in the chamber. But the institution existed for a reason: texts bearing God's name must not be discarded profanely, and…

What a genizah receives is what people had in hand when they cleared their papers: overwhelmingly letters they had received, not the ones they sent, which lay in other people's houses across the Mediterranean — mostly in towns with no surviving genizah.…

This conjecture joins the archaeology of abandoned Egyptian towns — offices and houses buried with their papers still inside — to the records-management practice of living institutions that weeded their files for centuries. Archives transmitted continuously by surviving institutions were filtered by…

A cartulary — the bound book into which a monastery copied its loose charters — is usually treated as a photocopier; this conjecture treats it as an investment portfolio. Copying cost scribal labour, so the compiler triaged by future litigation value: perpetual…

We treat surviving family papers from Roman Egypt as a fair sample of ancient economic life, but this conjecture claims litigation was the great engine of preservation: documents were copied, certified, bundled into dossiers, and locked away because someone was fighting over…

Manuscript losses are usually narrated as history — this fire, that war, those dissolutions. The conjecture joins survival to radioactive decay: within a given regime of material and custody (papyrus in dry Egypt, papyrus elsewhere, parchment in institutional libraries, paper in private…

Geniza men's books move through living paperwork — sales, loans of volumes, copying commissions — while the conjecture is that women's book ownership surfaces almost only at the two forced inventories of a woman's property: the trousseau list at marriage and the…