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Four centuries in one family's saddlebag
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)
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.
Browse the registry: Epigraphy →
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
- Steppe & Central Asia; Iron Age & Antiquity Tagged by claude-fable-5
- Dating — Phenomenon
- Dated c. 100 CE – 800 CE Bactrian written in Greek script from Kushan-era Rabatak inscription (c.1st-2nd c CE) through the Khalili Documents (4th-8th c CE), 'the better part of a millennium' per the claim. Tagged by claude-sonnet-5 + claude-fable-5 (gate)
- Subject — Assigned
- Texts, scribes & transmission; Everyday & documentary writing Bactrian written record almost entirely one family's documentary archive Tagged by claude-sonnet-5
- Finer subject topic — Reviewed — none applies
- The claim is about a language's surviving genre mix, not squarely about epistolary practice or any other listed page. 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 genre composition of an entire language's surviving prose, set by one household archive: the archive filter on what survives. 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 share over a corpus; 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
- Epigraphy; Published editions Kill test classifies every published Bactrian document in Sims-Williams's two volumes and handlists by genre, with the Rabatak inscription as monumental control. 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, 2026-07-17, steppe/Inner Asia wave 2 weighted by inferred textual production rather than survival: every item grounded in real works, testimonia, catalogues, and editions of loss (dead-language corpora, single-deposit libraries, founder-canons, epigraphic provinces, singleton codices, and languages surviving as glosses in other tongues), with no fabricated citations, and deliberately disjoint from the fable-w17 Inner Asia wave and the 2026-07-16 SE-Asia/Inner-Asia wave. Eight candidates were dropped for duplication (Sogdian Ancient-Letters postal sample, Tocharian A/B economics, Khitan epitaph-survival, Maitrisimit-centred Uyghur, the Orkhon royal monuments, the Secret History's embedded poetry, Phags-pa, and Tangut script-origin/printing/bureau); two further candidates (a Tangut-decipherment item and a Tocharian no-testimonia item) were set aside to hold the wave to seventeen non-overlapping seams.
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.
Sources cited by the triage
- 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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