One Thousand and One Conjectures

Joins Shannon information theory to Mesopotamian political cycles, under the slogan that strong states make boring archives. Shannon entropy measures the diversity of a distribution — here, the mix of genres (receipts, contracts, letters, school texts, literature) among a period's surviving cuneiform…

Heaps' law — the corpus-linguistics regularity that a collection's vocabulary grows as a sublinear power of its size — is here applied to the oldest writing system on earth. Cuneiform's inventory of distinct signs should grow with corpus size along a Heaps…

Archaeologists distinguish archives that were deliberately closed from archives killed by catastrophe using burn layers and collapsed walls — evidence that looting and old excavations have often destroyed. But bureaux lived by the fiscal calendar: accounts were balanced and files culled at…

Old Babylonian contracts were often sealed inside clay envelopes that repeated the whole text — an expensive tamper-proofing device familiar to every museum visitor. Transaction-cost economics holds that costly verification is bought when trust is scarce: strangers get notarized, neighbours get a…

The stabilization of texts like Gilgamesh into fixed first-millennium versions is traditionally credited to editors — named redactors imposing a canonical text. Error-correction theory says something different: copies proofread against multiple circulating exemplars converge automatically, and convergence speed rises with exemplar density.…

Survival analysis distinguishes institutions by the shape of their exit curves: fixed terms produce peaked tenure distributions, seniority protection produces falling hazards, and service at pleasure — where dismissal strikes like lightning — produces the memoryless exponential. Ur III prosopography supplies thousands…

Modern legal systems set value thresholds for formality: above a statutory amount, contracts require notarization or extra witnesses. Old Babylonian contracts vary conspicuously in their formality — sealed or unsealed, three witnesses or ten — and the variation is usually attributed to…

Forensic accountants catch motivated bookkeeping not by finding errors but by finding directional errors: honest mistakes are symmetric, interested ones lean. Ur III balanced accounts are recomputable — the tablets show the arithmetic, and modern readers can redo the sums — and…