One monastery's rubbish maps a church

Claim (verbatim)

The Church of the East reached deep into Inner Asia — its patriarchs appointed metropolitans for Samarkand, for Kashgar, eventually for the Ongut on the Yellow River — but almost the entire manuscript record of that vast mission comes from the book-refuse of one ruined monastery north of Turfan, Bulayiq, whose Syriac, Sogdian, and a little Uyghur material now sits in Berlin. A continental church is thus reconstructed from a single node's discards. The mechanism is a node filter: a dispersed institution copies liturgy and scripture at every station, but only where a station's waste paper happened to be buried in a dry ruin does the copying survive, so the geography of surviving Christian texts records the geography of preservation, not the geography of the faith — the named sees with no manuscripts are the norm, and Bulayiq is the fluke. The corpus's own contents betray the wider system precisely because they are so ordinary: standard East-Syriac lectionary, psalter, hymnody, and bilingual teaching texts, the interchangeable liturgical kit any station would hold, implying dozens of vanished Bulayiqs. Prediction: mapping every documented community of the medieval Church of the East east of the Oxus (from episcopal lists, colophons, and travellers' reports) against the sites that have actually yielded Christian manuscripts, fewer than one site in five of the attested network will have produced a single surviving Christian manuscript, and Bulayiq alone will account for the majority of the surviving Sogdian-and-Syriac manuscript mass (primary clause: the under-20% manuscript-yield rate across the attested network; the verdict follows it). Kill: Nicholas Sims-Williams, A Dictionary: Christian Sogdian, Syriac and English (2016) and the Christian Sogdian texts in the Berliner Turfantexte, with Erica Hunter and Mark Dickens, Syriac Manuscripts from the Berlin Turfan Collection (VOHD, 2014), against the episcopal geography in Jean Dauvillier's and David Wilmshurst's surveys of the East-Syriac provinces.

Prediction clause (verbatim)

Prediction: mapping every documented community of the medieval Church of the East east of the Oxus (from episcopal lists, colophons, and travellers' reports) against the sites that have actually yielded Christian manuscripts, fewer than one site in five of the attested network will have produced a single surviving Christian manuscript, and Bulayiq alone will account for the majority of the surviving Sogdian-and-Syriac manuscript mass (primary clause: the under-20% manuscript-yield rate across the attested network; the verdict follows it).

Kill-dataset (verbatim)

Kill: Nicholas Sims-Williams, A Dictionary: Christian Sogdian, Syriac and English (2016) and the Christian Sogdian texts in the Berliner Turfantexte, with Erica Hunter and Mark Dickens, Syriac Manuscripts from the Berlin Turfan Collection (VOHD, 2014), against the episcopal geography in Jean Dauvillier's and David Wilmshurst's surveys of the East-Syriac provinces.

Novelty / leakage triage

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

That Bulayiq's book-refuse supplies the overwhelming bulk of the surviving Sogdian-and-Syriac Christian manuscript mass, and that the East-Syriac network east of the Oxus is mostly attested by sees with no surviving manuscripts, is documented in Hunter and Dickens' Turfan Syriac catalogue and Sims-Williams' Christian Sogdian dictionary, against the episcopal geography surveyed by Dauvillier. But the primary clause is a specific yield-rate - under one attested site in five having produced a surviving Christian manuscript - and no published work maps the complete attested network against manuscript-yielding sites to state that fraction. The nearest prior art works both halves separately; the join as posed is un-run.

• Erica C. D. Hunter & Mark Dickens, Syriac Manuscripts from the Berlin Turfan Collection (VOHD, Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 2014)
• Nicholas Sims-Williams, A Dictionary: Christian Sogdian, Syriac and English (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2016)
• Jean Dauvillier, 'Les provinces chaldeennes de l'exterieur au Moyen Age' (Melanges F. Cavallera, Toulouse, 1948)

Predictions

No prediction registered yet.