Four centuries in one family's saddlebag

Claim (verbatim)

Bactrian — the only Iranian language ever written in Greek script, the administrative tongue of the Kushans and their successors — was a written language for the better part of a millennium, yet until the 1990s it was known almost entirely from coin legends and the single great Rabatak inscription. Then a corpus of leather and cloth documents surfaced and was edited by Nicholas Sims-Williams as the Bactrian Documents from Northern Afghanistan (Khalili Collection): letters, contracts, receipts, and lists — the paperwork of a few related households and the small polities they dealt with, spanning roughly the fourth to the eighth century. That archive is now the overwhelming bulk of the entire Bactrian textual record, which means an entire language's surviving prose is essentially one dossier of legal-economic and epistolary documents; literature, scripture, history, and science are absent not because Bactria lacked them but because those genres travelled through institutions that left no buried dossier. The mechanism is the archive filter at its purest: a language whose survival hinges on one deposit inherits that deposit's genre, and a household's deed-box preserves deeds. Prediction: classifying every published Bactrian document and inscription by genre, legal-economic and epistolary documents will exceed 90% of the non-numismatic Bactrian corpus by item count, with literary, scriptural, and scientific texts together under 5%, and the concentration will tighten, not loosen, as new Bactrian material is published (primary clause: the 90% legal-epistolary share; the verdict follows it). Kill: Nicholas Sims-Williams, Bactrian Documents from Northern Afghanistan, I: Legal and Economic Documents (2000; rev. 2012) and II: Letters and Buddhist Texts (2007), with his Bactrian personal-names and corpus handlists and the Rabatak inscription edition as the monumental control.

Prediction clause (verbatim)

Prediction: classifying every published Bactrian document and inscription by genre, legal-economic and epistolary documents will exceed 90% of the non-numismatic Bactrian corpus by item count, with literary, scriptural, and scientific texts together under 5%, and the concentration will tighten, not loosen, as new Bactrian material is published (primary clause: the 90% legal-epistolary share; the verdict follows it).

Kill-dataset (verbatim)

Kill: Nicholas Sims-Williams, Bactrian Documents from Northern Afghanistan, I: Legal and Economic Documents (2000; rev. 2012) and II: Letters and Buddhist Texts (2007), with his Bactrian personal-names and corpus handlists and the Rabatak inscription edition as the monumental control.

Novelty / leakage triage

already answered in the literature

Sims-Williams' edition is itself the genre tabulation: volume I is Legal and Economic Documents, volume II Letters and Buddhist Texts, so the corpus is organised as legal-economic plus epistolary with only a small Buddhist appendix and no literary, scriptural-proper, or scientific class. The over-90% legal-epistolary share and the under-5% literary/scriptural/scientific share the primary clause predicts are guaranteed by the published corpus's own structure, with the Rabatak inscription the lone monumental control. The concentration is stated, not awaiting a fresh audit.

• Nicholas Sims-Williams, Bactrian Documents from Northern Afghanistan, I: Legal and Economic Documents (Oxford, 2000; rev. 2012)
• Nicholas Sims-Williams, Bactrian Documents from Northern Afghanistan, II: Letters and Buddhist Texts (London, 2007)

Predictions

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