← All conjectures · Central & Inner Asian texts
Forty thousand scraps, a few hundred books
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“Anticipated in print” means the direction of this claim already appears in scholarship, while this exact test has never been run — it records prior art, not proof; nothing here counts as supported or falsified until a registered resolution says so.
Claim (verbatim)
The German Turfan expeditions of 1902-1914 carried tens of thousands of manuscript fragments back to Berlin, of which the Old Uyghur portion is among the largest single deposits of a medieval Inner Asian literature. But a fragment is not a book. The Berlin holdings are being catalogued piece by piece in the VOHD Alttuerkische Handschriften series and the digital Turfan archive, and the striking fact of that catalogue is the ratio: thousands of fragments resolve into a modest roster of distinct works, most of them Buddhist, many known from a single scrap and a handful from dozens of overlapping copies. The mechanism is a shredding filter — a ruined monastery library that has been through fire, damp, reuse, and excavation delivers its texts as confetti, so the number of physical items wildly overstates the number of works while understating how many works vanished entirely; the singletons are the survivors of a class whose other members left no scrap at all. The distribution of copies per work is therefore the diagnostic: a few liturgical staples in many copies, a long tail of once-attested works, and — inferable behind them — a lost majority that fell below one surviving fragment. Prediction: reducing the catalogued Old Uyghur Turfan fragments to distinct works, the fragment-to-work ratio will exceed ten to one, and at least half of the distinct works will be attested by a single fragment (primary clause: the majority-singleton result; a copy-count distribution without a dominant singleton class falsifies it). Kill: the VOHD Verzeichnis der Orientalischen Handschriften in Deutschland, Alttuerkische Handschriften volumes, joined to the Digitales Turfan-Archiv (Turfanforschung, BBAW) fragment inventory.
Prediction clause (verbatim)
Prediction: reducing the catalogued Old Uyghur Turfan fragments to distinct works, the fragment-to-work ratio will exceed ten to one, and at least half of the distinct works will be attested by a single fragment (primary clause: the majority-singleton result; a copy-count distribution without a dominant singleton class falsifies it).
Kill-dataset (verbatim)
Kill: the VOHD Verzeichnis der Orientalischen Handschriften in Deutschland, Alttuerkische Handschriften volumes, joined to the Digitales Turfan-Archiv (Turfanforschung, BBAW) fragment inventory.
Browse the registry: Dunhuang & Turfan hoards →
Nobody has run this test. The kill-data is named above. If you can run it — or you know the paper that already settles it — claim the kill or submit the prior scholarship. Kills and prior scholarship are credited here, by name, as they come in.
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; Medieval Tagged by claude-fable-5
- Dating — Phenomenon
- Dated c. 800 CE – 1400 CE Old Uyghur literary production from Uyghur settlement of Turfan (840s) through Mongol-Yuan era Buddhist copying (to 14th c); Berlin Turfan expeditions (1902-1914) are the instrument. Tagged by claude-sonnet-5 + claude-fable-5 (gate)
- Subject — Assigned
- Texts, scribes & transmission fragment-to-distinct-work ratio in a catalogued manuscript deposit Tagged by claude-sonnet-5
- Finer subject topic — Reviewed — none applies
- No listed Atlas subject page is squarely about the Turfan fragment deposits. 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 fragment-to-work ratio and the singleton share in a shredded monastic deposit: how a ruined library delivers its texts. 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 fragment-to-work ratio and a singleton share; the lost majority below one fragment is inferred in prose, with no unseen-species estimate registered. 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
- Dunhuang & Turfan hoards; Union catalogues Kill test reduces the catalogued Old Uyghur Turfan fragments to works using the VOHD Alttuerkische Handschriften volumes joined to the Digitales Turfan-Archiv inventory. 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
anticipated in the literature — this exact test has never been run
The VOHD Alttuerkische Handschriften volumes and the Digitales Turfan-Archiv catalogue the Old Uyghur fragments and identify their works, so the raw material for the test is in print. But the cataloguing is still proceeding across many fascicles, and no published study reduces the whole corpus to distinct works and states the corpus-wide fragment-to-work ratio or the singleton fraction the primary clause predicts. The immediate neighbourhood is heavily worked; the specific copy-count distribution as posed has not been computed corpus-wide.
Sources cited by the triage
- Verzeichnis der Orientalischen Handschriften in Deutschland (VOHD), Alttuerkische Handschriften series (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner)
- Digitales Turfan-Archiv, Turfanforschung (Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften)
Predictions
No prediction registered yet.
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