Rustam rides through on a single leaf

Claim (verbatim)

The Sogdians were the great middlemen of the Silk Road, and their surviving literature is almost entirely somebody else's religion: Buddhist sutras from Chinese, Manichaean hymns, Christian lectionaries from Syriac — translation corpora serving the three imported churches of the diaspora. Native Sogdian narrative, the secular storytelling of a people famous for it, survives in a near-vanishing handful of fragments, the emblem of which is a single damaged folio from Dunhuang telling an episode of Rustam and the demons — Iranian epic matter in Sogdian dress, generations before Ferdowsi fixed the Persian version — beside a few fable-scraps of the Aesopic and Panchatantra kind. The mechanism is a sponsorship filter: churches command scriptoria and copy their canons at volume, so the imported religions manufacture their own survival, while the secular tale lives in performance and gets written down only glancingly; a merchant culture's stories are exactly the material least likely to be institutionally recopied. The Rustam leaf is therefore not a curiosity but a class-representative — the visible tip of a lost oral-and-written Sogdian narrative literature whose scale we can only infer from the fame of its tellers. Prediction: classifying the whole edited Sogdian corpus by function, translated religious texts (Buddhist, Manichaean, Christian) will account for over 85% of running text, native secular narrative for under 2%, and that secular remainder will be dominated by a few short fragments no one of which preserves a complete work (primary clause: the under-2% secular-narrative share; the verdict follows it). Kill: Emile Benveniste, Textes sogdiens (1940) and the British Library Sogdian collection (Or. 8212), with Nicholas Sims-Williams' handlist of Sogdian manuscripts and the Christian and Manichaean Sogdian editions in the Berliner Turfantexte as the denominator.

Prediction clause (verbatim)

Prediction: classifying the whole edited Sogdian corpus by function, translated religious texts (Buddhist, Manichaean, Christian) will account for over 85% of running text, native secular narrative for under 2%, and that secular remainder will be dominated by a few short fragments no one of which preserves a complete work (primary clause: the under-2% secular-narrative share; the verdict follows it).

Kill-dataset (verbatim)

Kill: Emile Benveniste, Textes sogdiens (1940) and the British Library Sogdian collection (Or. 8212), with Nicholas Sims-Williams' handlist of Sogdian manuscripts and the Christian and Manichaean Sogdian editions in the Berliner Turfantexte as the denominator.

Novelty / leakage triage

anticipated in the literature — this exact test has never been run

The overwhelming dominance of translated religious literature (Buddhist, Manichaean, Christian) in the edited Sogdian corpus, and the near-vanishing of native secular narrative to a few fragments led by the Dunhuang Rustam leaf, is well known from Benveniste's Textes sogdiens and the Berliner Turfantexte editions. But the primary clause is a running-text proportion - over 85% religious, under 2% secular-narrative - and no published study computes those percentages across the whole heterogeneous corpus (translations plus documents plus the secular scraps). The materials and the qualitative skew are in print; the specific running-text arithmetic as posed is un-run.

• Emile Benveniste, Textes sogdiens (Mission Pelliot en Asie centrale, Paris: Geuthner, 1940)
• Christian and Manichaean Sogdian editions in the Berliner Turfantexte series (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag)

Predictions

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