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The drawings died first
Status is derived only from the shepherd-authored triage/prediction data above -- community submissions and claims are a separate overlay and can never change it (see the participation panel below).
“Anticipated in print” means the direction of this claim already appears in scholarship, while this exact test has never been run — it records prior art, not proof; nothing here counts as supported or falsified until a registered resolution says so.
Claim (verbatim)
Alchemy is an apparatus art - stills, the kerotakis, digestion vessels, furnaces - and its oldest witnesses carry the pictures: Marcianus gr. 299 and the Paris primaries transmit the celebrated apparatus figures and the Chrysopoeia of Cleopatra sheet with the ouroboros. Diagrams are the corpus's highest-bandwidth carrier of workshop knowledge and its least copyable component: a scribe can reproduce sentences he does not understand, but a drawing of a still, copied by a copyist who never saw one, degrades toward ornament in a generation, and a hurried copyist simply omits it, leaving a blank or nothing. Figure-transmission should therefore decay down the tradition while the surrounding text persists - a deskilling gradient made visible in the manuscripts, the pictorial signature of a technical literature passing out of practitioners' hands into scribes'. The CMAG catalogue, whose descriptions record figures and blank spaces, is the instrument that can count it. Prediction restated: at most 35 percent of described corpus witnesses carry apparatus figures at all, and the figure-carrying share among pre-1500 witnesses runs at least twice the share among post-1500 copies - the later the copy, the more likely the art arrives as words alone. If instead the recentiores carry figures at equal or higher rates, the deskilling gradient dies and figure-loss was mere accident of survey.
Prediction clause (verbatim)
Prediction: censusing CMAG descriptions of corpus witnesses, at most 35 percent carry apparatus figures (primary clause: the <=0.35 figure-carrying share; the verdict follows it), and the figure-carrying share among pre-1500 witnesses is at least twice the share among post-1500 witnesses; only manuscripts with full CMAG descriptions count, a recorded blank-left-for-figures counts as absence, and the test voids for coverage if fewer than 25 corpus witnesses have descriptions explicit enough to decide figure presence.
Kill-dataset (verbatim)
Kill: CMAG (8 vols, Brussels 1924-1932) manuscript descriptions - a figure-presence census over corpus witnesses, date-stratified at 1500.
Browse the registry: Union catalogues →
Nobody has run this test. The kill-data is named above. If you can run it — or you know the paper that already settles it — claim the kill or submit the prior scholarship. Kills and prior scholarship are credited here, by name, as they come in.
How this item is catalogued
Catalogue tags are curatorial metadata that make the conjecture findable. They are not findings, not a novelty verdict, and naming a source family is not a promise that the data exist or are accessible. Each dimension below says whether it was assigned, reviewed with none applying, uncertain, or not yet reviewed, and who recorded it.
- Place & era tags — Assigned
- Aegean & Greece; Europe; Medieval Tagged by claude-fable-5
- Dating — Phenomenon
- Dated c. 900 CE – 1700 CE Same CMAG-censused corpus witnesses date-stratified at 1500 in the prediction, spanning Marcianus gr. 299 (10th c.) through post-1500 copies into the 17th c. Tagged by claude-sonnet-5 + claude-fable-5 (gate)
- Subject — Assigned
- Medicine, science & the occult (from the generation section)
- Finer subject topic — Assigned
- Manuscript and scribal production Whether copyists reproduced, degraded or omitted apparatus drawings is squarely manuscript and scribal production. Tagged by claude-opus-5 draft (requested max effort) adjudicated by claude-fable-5-1 driver, lane 1da5; runtime not independently attested
- Claim level — Assigned
- Record claim The prediction is the share of witnesses carrying apparatus figures and its decline after 1500: copyist behaviour in reproducing diagrams. Tagged by claude-opus-5 draft (requested max effort) adjudicated by claude-fable-5-1 driver, lane 1da5; runtime not independently attested
- Method — Reviewed — none applies
- A figure-carrying share and a share ratio between two date strata; the deskilling gradient is not fitted as a curve. Tagged by claude-opus-5 draft (requested max effort) adjudicated by claude-fable-5-1 driver, lane 1da5; runtime not independently attested
- Evidence source — Assigned
- Union catalogues Kill test censuses CMAG manuscript descriptions for figures and blanks, date-stratified at 1500. Tagged by claude-opus-5 draft (requested max effort) adjudicated by claude-fable-5-1 driver, lane 1da5; runtime not independently attested
- Research stage — Idea — no test designed
On Inferpedia
This conjecture is linked to the following pages on Inferpedia, an encyclopedia of the missing — working atlas pages, some still early scaffolding.
Provenance
Run: Fresh agent generation · model: claude-fable-5
Fresh blind generation by claude-fable-5, 2026-07-18, craft-and-technical-knowledge domain: the Graeco-Egyptian alchemical corpus and its Syriac/Arabic penumbra, chosen because it is the pre-print world's best-instrumented lost technical literature - a closed corpus with open, named instruments (CAAG 1887-88 open scans; CMAG 1924-32; Suda On Line; the Theban papyri in Leemans/Lagercrantz/Halleux; Berthelot-Duval CMA II open; Fihrist in Fluegel/Dodge; Kraus 1943 + Sezgin GAS IV) - and because greps showed the core untouched (Zosimos, Marcianus, Stockholm/Leiden papyri, Maria, Cleopatra, Ostanes, Democritus/Bolus, Berthelot, chrysopoeia, Kraus, Jabir/Geber, Hermes/Hermetica: no hits anywhere). Carves and seams, checked wave by wave: lost-in-translation 2026-07-18 owns translation-as-survival (Galen/Hunayn, Hero's Mechanics ord 5, al-Kindi Fihrist book-list survival ord 8, versio-only shares) - no Greek-cliff/Arabic-continuation item here, and the Syriac Zosimos enters only inside the ord-5 alphabet-coverage census whose primary clause is corpus completeness, not translation survival; byzantine-dbbe-pinakes owns Photios, pooled Suda title-survival (its ord 4) and the Pinakes earliest-witness histogram (its ord 9) - witness censuses here run on CMAG, a different instrument, and the Suda serves only as a single-entry book-count yardstick (operation-shape shared with ancient-sound ord 10 on Aristoxenus; new author, new letter-coverage operation, flagged); ancient-sound ord 7 owns burial-vs-copying for music - ord 8 here runs a descendant-census channel split on a different corpus with a different operation; fable-w20 ord 15 owns positional recipe stratigraphy (papyri.info/eVK) and ord 26 owns Latin alchemical incipit camouflage (eTK) - no positional or incipit operations here and Latin alchemy left untouched (w20's 'Mappae' hit is mappae mundi, so the Mappae clavicula remains free for a future recipe-book wave); the Fihrist is a crowded instrument (five prior waves) reused solely as the maqala-10 roster inside a two-catalogue asymmetry join no prior wave runs, flagged. Dropped candidates: Hero/Philon/Ctesibius mechanics (coordination instruction plus lost-in-translation ord 5), Dioscorides alphabetization (byzantine-wave adjacency; Galen owned), Geoponica/lost agronomists and Mappae clavicula/Theophilus (both verified free - reserved as future bodies), Turba philosophorum (translation-survival shape owned). Soft counts (pinax entry total, lexicon entry count, Pliny index-book count, roll length, Syriac letter-book count, Kraus register arithmetic) are kept out of load-bearing primary clauses behind explicit coverage guards; ords 2, 4, 8, 9 rest on HIGH-confidence anchors, ords 1, 5, 6, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14 on MODERATE counts flagged in the report, ord 15 is honestly Kill-not-yet-built.
Novelty / leakage triage
anticipated in the literature — this exact test has never been run
The celebrated figures of M and the Paris primaries are reproduced and discussed in print (Berthelot's Introduction prints the apparatus figures; the Bude studies Zosimos' instruments), and CMAG descriptions record figures and blanks witness by witness; but the figure-presence share across catalogued corpus witnesses and its date-stratified gradient at 1500 - the deskilling census the primary clause pins - was not located as ever having been counted.
Sources cited by the triage
- M. Berthelot, Introduction a l'etude de la chimie des anciens et du moyen age (Paris, 1889), with the apparatus figures reproduced from the Venice and Paris manuscripts
- Catalogue des manuscrits alchimiques grecs, 8 vols (Brussels, 1924-1932), manuscript descriptions
- M. Mertens, Les alchimistes grecs IV.1 (Paris, 1995), on Zosimos' apparatus and the figures
Predictions
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