One Thousand and One Conjectures

A scribe copying from an exemplar in front of him makes errors of the eye — confusing letters that look alike — whereas a scribe taking down a text read aloud, as in dictation or the pecia system of mass university production,…

The modern capital campaign — where a museum or university secures a headline anchor gift or star acquisition just before asking everyone else for money — is here read back into the medieval church. Relic translations, the ceremonial installation of a saint's…

The backward-bending supply curve — the textbook anomaly in which workers with an income target respond to falling prices by working more, not less — is here joined to the fate of Norse Greenland. The colony's export staple was walrus ivory, and…

This joins Gothic cathedral construction to the economics of competitive escalation — the same arms-race dynamics seen in armament races and advertising wars. A cathedral's height was a prestige signal aimed at specific rivals, and the relevant rivals were local: the sees…

This joins medieval church archaeology to geomagnetism. Churches were meant to face east, yet surveyed orientations scatter by several degrees, and the scatter is usually written off as sloppy surveying. But once the magnetic compass entered the building trades — plausibly around…

This joins the mysterious accuracy of medieval portolan charts to the statistics of error averaging. Portolans appear in the late 13th century already startlingly accurate, with no known surveying campaign behind them; the conjecture's explanation is that they are averaged compass logs…

This joins two of the medieval world's best data series: the Nilometer readings of the Nile's annual flood, kept for centuries at Cairo, and the grain prices preserved in the Cairo Geniza's merchant letters. Egypt's harvest was the flood: a low Nile…

Markowitz's portfolio theory says diversification pays exactly when the assets you spread across are weakly correlated — variance falls fastest where covariance is low. The medieval open-field system's scattered strips, a puzzle ever since they were read as peasant insurance, are a…

Airborne LiDAR has stripped the canopy from the Maya lowlands and revealed settlement in the tens of thousands of structures, making true regional settlement hierarchies measurable for the first time; settlement-scaling theory, meanwhile, holds that integrated urban systems produce Zipfian rank-size distributions…

RT60 — the time a sound takes to decay by sixty decibels — is the basic figure of architectural acoustics, and a great stone nave can hold a note for many seconds; a fast syllabic melody blurs into mud in such a…

Muqarnas — the honeycomb vaulting of Islamic architecture, thousands of small stepped niches filling domes and squinches — is usually read as pure geometry made ornament. But a surface of many differently sized and angled cells is exactly what a modern acoustician…

The Polynesian settlement of the Pacific is the greatest search problem ever solved by a preindustrial society, and optimal search theory says how a rational searcher orders targets: not by raw distance, but by how easy each target is to find. An…

The deep blue of medieval stained glass comes from cobalt, and medieval Europe mined very little of it: the colorant travelled along long-distance routes whose ultimate sources lay far to the east. Every ore body carries a trace-element fingerprint — the ratios…

Joins web-graph topology to hadith science: when Broder and colleagues mapped the early web, they found a bowtie — a small strongly-connected core through which most hyperlink paths route. This conjecture claims the isnad network of the canonical hadith collections has the…

Joins process-engineering labor accounting to Viking naval history. Tally the person-hours in a longship and the surprise is that the hull is the cheap part: replication labor budgets show a large woolen sail — the wool sorted, spun thread by thread, woven,…

Joins experience-curve economics to Islamic mathematical geography. In manufacturing, quality improves as a power law of cumulative output — the experience curve — because every unit produced teaches its producers. Every mosque is such a unit: it must face Mecca, its measurable…

Vertical-monopoly pricing from industrial organization shows that a chain of independent monopolists along one route charges more in total than a single owner would, because each ignores the damage its markup does to the others' traffic. This conjecture reads the toll castles…

Connects the runic acrostic signatures of Cynewulf — a poet who engineered personal credit into his verse — to oral-formulaic theory's central variable: a poet composing for written attribution has an incentive not to sound like everyone else, while anonymous traditional composition…

Joins Maya vase literacy to the sociology of workshop imitation: the Primary Standard Sequence — the dedication formula rimming elite drinking vessels — was ordered, slotted, and rhythmic, and patrons wanted its look even from painters who could not read. If pseudo-glyph…

Joins skaldic poetry's survival to a citation-driven preservation model: drottkvaett stanzas were too dense to read for pleasure once the courts that paid for them dissolved, but sagas and kings' lives needed them as evidence — quoted testimony anchoring prose claims —…

Connects the invention of the troubadour vidas and razos — the prose lives and song-explanations in the chansonniers — to an export-market failure: at home in Occitania the songs circulated inside a living performance scene that supplied all needed context, but the…

the Catena aurea project (begun 1263) was a supply shock to Aquinas's citation economy. Compiling it built him a personal bank of newly translated Greek patristic excerpts, so afterwards his Greek-father citation volume should jump discontinuously across all genres of his writing…

after about 1300 the working Aristotle of the arts faculties was a florilegium of exam-ready tags, not the translations. Oral disputation and examination rewarded fixed memorizable slogans, and once the popular auctoritates handbooks compiled them, the tag-list became the effective text —…

The celebrated accuracy of the second Tripitaka Koreana conceals a geopolitics of textual lineage. Sugi's collation bureau worked from three witnesses — the Song Kai-bao line, the Khitan (Liao) canon, and the first Koryo carving — and recorded its adjudications in the…