← All conjectures · Pre-Columbian American writing
History on stone, science on ash
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).
Claim (verbatim)
Four Maya books survive — the Dresden, Madrid, and Paris codices and the Maya Codex of Mexico — against Diego de Landa's own report of the 1562 auto-da-fe at Mani: a great number of books found, and all of them burned as lies of the devil. All four survivors are instruments: Venus and eclipse tables, day-count multiplication tables, almanacs — the Dresden's Venus pages and its eclipse table are the exemplars. The monumental corpus, thousands of texts on stelae, lintels, and altars, is the opposite genre: dynastic event-record. The partition is a partition of media: predictive astronomy lived on paper and on the working walls of scribes — the Xultun murals, with their lunar reckonings and day-count multiples, are a scribal workshop, not a public monument — while history lived on stone. If so, Landa's fire was not a proportional sampling of Maya literature: it deleted the science class of the civilization's books nearly entire, and the four survivors are a genre remnant, not a library cross-section. Prediction: in the Maya Hieroglyphic Database, ephemeris-table structures — day-count multiple tables and ring-number or serpent-number constructions serving Venus, eclipse, or lunar reckoning — will occur in the four codices and in scribal-context wall texts such as Xultun, but on fewer than 1% of public monumental texts, although monuments constitute the overwhelming majority of the glyphic corpus by text count (primary clause: the under-1% monumental share of ephemeris-table structures; the verdict follows it). Kill: the Maya Hieroglyphic Database (Macri-Looper), queried by text type and provenience, controlled against the Corpus of Maya Hieroglyphic Inscriptions (Peabody Museum, Harvard) and the SLUB Dresden open digitization of the Codex Dresdensis; the computation is a genre-by-medium contingency table.
Prediction clause (verbatim)
Prediction: in the Maya Hieroglyphic Database, ephemeris-table structures — day-count multiple tables and ring-number or serpent-number constructions serving Venus, eclipse, or lunar reckoning — will occur in the four codices and in scribal-context wall texts such as Xultun, but on fewer than 1% of public monumental texts, although monuments constitute the overwhelming majority of the glyphic corpus by text count (primary clause: the under-1% monumental share of ephemeris-table structures; the verdict follows it).
Kill-dataset (verbatim)
Kill: the Maya Hieroglyphic Database (Macri-Looper), queried by text type and provenience, controlled against the Corpus of Maya Hieroglyphic Inscriptions (Peabody Museum, Harvard) and the SLUB Dresden open digitization of the Codex Dresdensis; the computation is a genre-by-medium contingency table.
Browse the registry: Mesoamerican codices →
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
- Americas; Cross-period Tagged by Claude (Opus 4.8)
- Dating — Phenomenon
- Dated c. 200 CE – 1600 CE Maya glyphic corpus: Classic monumental writing (c.250 CE onward, incl. Xultun c.9th c.) through the four Postclassic codices and Landa's 1562 auto-da-fe; Maya Hieroglyphic Database is the instrument. Tagged by claude-sonnet-5 + claude-fable-5 (gate)
- Subject — Assigned
- Texts, scribes & transmission; Time, sky & calendars differential survival by genre/media (astronomical almanac vs monumental stone) Tagged by claude-sonnet-5
- Finer subject topic — Reviewed — none applies
- No listed Atlas subject page is squarely about Maya writing or codices. 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 that ephemeris-table structures sit on paper and workshop walls and almost never on public monuments: a genre-by-medium fact about what was written where, and hence what a burning deleted. 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 genre-by-medium contingency table read as shares; 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
- Mesoamerican codices Kill test queries the Maya Hieroglyphic Database by text type and provenience, controlled against the Corpus of Maya Hieroglyphic Inscriptions and the Dresden codex digitization. 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, 2026-07-16, breadth wave: Sub-Saharan Africa + pre-Columbian Americas, weighted by inferred production and above all by loss; every item grounded in real works, authors, codices, catalogues, and testimonia, including the real evidence of destruction, dispersal, and undecipherability; no fabricated citations.
Novelty / leakage triage
already answered in the literature
Mayanists have already established the medium-genre partition: ephemeris-table structures (day-count multiple tables, ring and serpent numbers) are known from the codices and, since 2012, from the Xultun scribal murals, with the Science paper stating that Classic-period precursors of the codex tables had not been found on any other medium; monuments record dynastic events. The under-1% MHD framing merely re-expresses a published categorical fact.
Sources cited by the triage
- W. Saturno, D. Stuart, A. Aveni & F. Rossi, 'Ancient Maya Astronomical Tables from Xultun, Guatemala', Science 336 (2012)
- H.M. Bricker & V.R. Bricker, Astronomy in the Maya Codices (American Philosophical Society, 2011)
Predictions
No prediction registered yet.
Weigh in
No community feedback yet.
New here? Create an account first
Create an account or sign in and your feedback is tied to you — you can track it, get replies, and claim this conjecture so others know you’re working on it. Prefer not to? Just leave your take below as a guest — only the name you type is shown.
Add your take
Posted immediately (spam is removed). Community feedback is never an adjudicated verdict and never changes this conjecture's triage label or status above.