Nine towns kept their book

Claim (verbatim)

The Books of Chilam Balam survive from eight or nine Yucatec towns — Chumayel, Tizimín, Kaua, Ixil, Tekax, Nah, Tusik, and Maní's material through the Códice Pérez — and they are not nine independent works but nine local instances of one distributed literature: town books in Yucatec Maya, kept by the maestros of each community, sharing katun prophecies, chronicles, and medical-astrological texts copied town to town for centuries. A living town book is recopied when it wears out, so the physical survivors are late copies (mostly eighteenth-century hands) of far older content, and survival required exactly one thing: that a town's copying chain still be unbroken when the nineteenth-century collectors — Juan Pío Pérez, Carl Hermann Berendt, Crescencio Carrillo y Ancona — arrived to transcribe or acquire. Towns whose chains broke earlier lost their books at the last-copy stage, and the scholarship remembers several such books by name, reported but now untraced; Maní's book itself survives only through Pérez's transcriptions, and even the Chumayel was stolen from the Biblioteca Cepeda in Mérida early in the twentieth century, resurfacing years later on the path that ended at Princeton. The genre's original extension was the cabecera network of colonial Yucatán — an order of magnitude wider than the surviving nine. Prediction: the standard enumeration (Barrera Vásquez and Rendón's El libro de los libros de Chilam Balam and its successors) will attest by name at least five town books now lost or untraced beyond those with surviving texts, and at least one major surviving text-tradition (Maní's) will prove to depend wholly on nineteenth-century copies of lost originals (primary clause: the five-named-lost-towns count; the verdict follows it). Kill: Alfredo Barrera Vásquez and Silvia Rendón, El libro de los libros de Chilam Balam (Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1948), with the Berendt-Brinton Linguistic Collection catalogue (University of Pennsylvania) and the Gates reproductions; the count is an enumeration over the published registers.

Prediction clause (verbatim)

Prediction: the standard enumeration (Barrera Vásquez and Rendón's El libro de los libros de Chilam Balam and its successors) will attest by name at least five town books now lost or untraced beyond those with surviving texts, and at least one major surviving text-tradition (Maní's) will prove to depend wholly on nineteenth-century copies of lost originals (primary clause: the five-named-lost-towns count; the verdict follows it).

Kill-dataset (verbatim)

Kill: Alfredo Barrera Vásquez and Silvia Rendón, El libro de los libros de Chilam Balam (Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1948), with the Berendt-Brinton Linguistic Collection catalogue (University of Pennsylvania) and the Gates reproductions; the count is an enumeration over the published registers.

Novelty / leakage triage

already answered in the literature

The primary clause asks the standard enumeration to attest by name at least five town books now lost or untraced, and that list is already readable in the published record: Roys's survey and Barrera Vasquez and Rendon's edition name Books of Chilam Balam from towns beyond the eight or nine surviving text-traditions that are known only by report or now untraced, comfortably exceeding five. The second half — that Mani's tradition depends wholly on nineteenth-century copies (the Codice Perez transcriptions by Pio Perez) — is textbook. A competent reader of the corpus literature already knows both, so the count is not an un-run study but an enumeration over registers in print.

• Alfredo Barrera Vasquez and Silvia Rendon, El libro de los libros de Chilam Balam (Mexico: Fondo de Cultura Economica, 1948)
• Ralph L. Roys, The Book of Chilam Balam of Chumayel (Washington: Carnegie Institution of Washington, 1933; repr. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1967), introduction on the corpus of town books

Predictions

No prediction registered yet.