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Three thousand titles under one signature
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)
The Arabic inheritor of the Greek art ran the opposite pathology: not a corpus starved of witnesses but a bibliography inflated past any possible shelf. Paul Kraus's 1943 register of the writings attributed to Jabir ibn Hayyan - still the corpus's map - numbers on the order of three thousand titles, organized into the attested collections: the Hundred and Twelve Books, the Seventy, the Hundred and Forty-Four Books of the Balances, the Five Hundred. Kraus also demonstrated what the corpus is: a school production, generations of writers filing under one authoritative signature, whose habit of self-citation - every treatise pointing to others, 'as we explained in the Book of...' - manufactures bibliography faster than books, including forward references to works plausibly never written. The register therefore mixes real lost books with phantom titles, and its extant fraction measures loss and mirage together: a small share of entries with any manuscript witness at all, and a gradient across collections - the compact canonical collections copied and surviving at higher rates than the sprawling serial ones. Attestation is cheap to manufacture; manuscripts are not; the gap between the two is the measurement. Prediction restated: at most 25 percent of Kraus's numbered entries have any extant manuscript witness, and the extant share of the Seventy Books exceeds the extant share of the Five Hundred.
Prediction clause (verbatim)
Prediction: tabulating Kraus's numbered register of Jabirian titles against recorded manuscript witnesses (Kraus's own notices supplemented by Sezgin, GAS IV), at most 25 percent of numbered entries have at least one extant manuscript witness (primary clause: the <=0.25 extant-entry share, refuted at >=0.40; the verdict follows it), and the extant share within the Seventy Books exceeds the extant share within the Five Hundred; the test voids for coverage if witness information cannot be resolved for at least half the register.
Kill-dataset (verbatim)
Kill (not yet built): Kraus, Jabir ibn Hayyan I: Le corpus des ecrits jabiriens (Cairo 1943) joined to Sezgin, GAS IV - the register and the manuscript inventory both exist in print but neither is machine-readable; the join must be tabulated before this can run.
Browse the registry: Not yet built →
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
- Islamic world; Medieval Tagged by claude-fable-5
- Dating — Phenomenon
- Dated c. 800 CE – 1000 CE The pseudo-Jabirian corpus's presumed 'school production' window, late 9th-10th century CE; Kraus's 1943 register is modern instrument. Tagged by claude-sonnet-5 + claude-fable-5 (gate)
- Subject — Assigned
- Medicine, science & the occult (from the generation section)
- Finer subject topic — Assigned
- Technical, recipe, and scientific texts The Jabirian corpus is squarely a practical technical (alchemical) corpus. 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 registered Jabirian titles with any extant manuscript witness: attested bibliography against surviving books. 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
- An extant-entry share plus a between-collection share comparison; no formal apparatus. 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
- Not yet built; Published editions The row's own kill line says not yet built: Kraus's register and Sezgin GAS IV exist only in print and the join must be tabulated before the test can run. 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
Kraus's register and its collection structure are published, and the collection-level gradient of the secondary clause is stated there - the Seventy transmitted as a collection (with a Latin Liber de septuaginta besides) against the fragmentarily attested Five Hundred - but the aggregate extant-share over the roughly three thousand numbered entries was not located as tabulated: the register-to-manuscript join (Kraus's notices supplemented by GAS IV) is, as the conjecture itself flags, not yet built, so the <=0.25 primary clause remains genuinely un-run.
Sources cited by the triage
- P. Kraus, Jabir ibn Hayyan: Contribution a l'histoire des idees scientifiques dans l'Islam, I: Le corpus des ecrits jabiriens (Cairo, 1943)
- F. Sezgin, Geschichte des arabischen Schrifttums IV (Leiden, 1971), Jabir chapter with the manuscript inventory
Predictions
No prediction registered yet.
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