A dynasty down to one copy

Claim (verbatim)

The Dīwān of the sultans of Kanem-Bornu — the girgam, a bare king-list with reign-lengths and mothers' names for the Sayfawa dynasty running back centuries — is the spine of pre-colonial central-Sudanic chronology, and it reached modern scholarship through the narrowest possible channel: Heinrich Barth was shown and copied it at Kukawa in the 1850s, and the surviving textual tradition descends through that encounter and a handful of related copies (edited by Dierk Lange, Le Dīwān des sultans du Kānem-Bornū, 1977; earlier through H. R. Palmer). A dynastic archive that must once have had genealogical, administrative, and chronicle depth survives as one thin list carried through effectively a single copy chain — the girgam is the visible tip of a Sayfawa documentary culture whose bulk is simply gone. The mechanism is single-thread transmission: where a text survives through one chain rather than a branching tradition, its copy errors and editorial choices pass undetectably, because there is no independent branch to collate against, and its chronology drifts uncorrected. Prediction: the number of physically independent pre-twentieth-century manuscript witnesses of the Kanem-Bornu Dīwān will be at most two, and its regnal absolute chronology before 1500 will diverge from externally anchored dates (from datable inscriptions and external Arabic testimonia) by more than a decade at multiple points (primary clause: at most two physically independent witnesses; the verdict follows it). Kill: Dierk Lange, Le Dīwān des sultans du (Kānem-)Bornū (Franz Steiner, 1977), with H. R. Palmer, Sudanese Memoirs (1928) and Barth's Travels and Discoveries in North and Central Africa (1857-58); the witness count is a manuscript-stemma tally, honestly noting that no queryable central-Sudanic manuscript database yet exists.

Prediction clause (verbatim)

Prediction: the number of physically independent pre-twentieth-century manuscript witnesses of the Kanem-Bornu Dīwān will be at most two, and its regnal absolute chronology before 1500 will diverge from externally anchored dates (from datable inscriptions and external Arabic testimonia) by more than a decade at multiple points (primary clause: at most two physically independent witnesses; the verdict follows it).

Kill-dataset (verbatim)

Kill: Dierk Lange, Le Dīwān des sultans du (Kānem-)Bornū (Franz Steiner, 1977), with H. R. Palmer, Sudanese Memoirs (1928) and Barth's Travels and Discoveries in North and Central Africa (1857-58); the witness count is a manuscript-stemma tally, honestly noting that no queryable central-Sudanic manuscript database yet exists.

Novelty / leakage triage

already answered in the literature

Lange's critical edition is itself the apparatus that answers the primary clause: it rests on the two known manuscripts of the Dīwān, both copies made for Barth at Kukawa in the 1850s, from which the entire modern tradition (and Palmer's earlier version) descends. The clause — at most two physically independent pre-twentieth-century witnesses — is therefore not a prediction but a restatement of the edition's stated witness base; because both copies trace to a single transmission event, 'at most two' is effectively guaranteed. The subordinate chronology point is likewise Lange's own project, his book being a revision of the Dīwān's absolute chronology against external testimonia. The verdict follows the witness count, and that count is enumerated in the kill-source itself.

Predictions

No prediction registered yet.