Extinct up north, taxed down south

Claim (verbatim)

The Ājīvikas — Makkhali Gosāla's order, ranked by early rivals alongside Buddhists and Jains (the Sāmaññaphala-sutta stages Gosāla before a king; Aśoka and his grandson Daśaratha endowed the Barābar and Nāgārjunī cave retreats for Ājīvikas) — left no surviving text at all: the canon is known solely through Buddhist and Jain refutations of its niyati doctrine. But the standard obituary, extinction in antiquity, is an artifact of reading only northern channels. A. L. Basham's monograph assembled the testimonia and found a long southern afterlife: Tamil sources (Maṇimēkalai, the Jain Nīlakēci, the Śaiva Civañāṉacittiyār) still engage Ājīvika doctrine as a live opponent, and medieval inscriptions of the Kannada-Tamil country record levies on Ājīvikas into the thirteenth-fourteenth centuries. A school with zero books thus has a measurable fifteen-century paper trail written entirely by its enemies and its tax collectors. Prediction: assembling every dateable primary reference to the Ājīvikas, textual and epigraphic, references after 600 CE will be at least three-quarters southern (Tamil and Kannada country); the latest dateable northern reference will precede the latest dated southern inscription by at least four centuries; and the dated southern epigraphic series will run past 1250 CE (primary clause: the three-quarters southern share after 600 CE; the verdict follows it). Kill: the testimonia assembled in A. L. Basham, History and Doctrines of the Ājīvikas (Luzac, 1951), with its inscriptional entries traceable in Epigraphia Carnatica and South Indian Inscriptions.

Prediction clause (verbatim)

Prediction: assembling every dateable primary reference to the Ājīvikas, textual and epigraphic, references after 600 CE will be at least three-quarters southern (Tamil and Kannada country); the latest dateable northern reference will precede the latest dated southern inscription by at least four centuries; and the dated southern epigraphic series will run past 1250 CE (primary clause: the three-quarters southern share after 600 CE; the verdict follows it).

Kill-dataset (verbatim)

Kill: the testimonia assembled in A. L. Basham, History and Doctrines of the Ājīvikas (Luzac, 1951), with its inscriptional entries traceable in Epigraphia Carnatica and South Indian Inscriptions.

Novelty / leakage triage

already answered in the literature

Basham's monograph established exactly this geography and chronology: northern references cease in antiquity while the Tamil and Kannada testimonia and a southern inscription series (from Pallava Simhavarman, c. 446 CE, to a last inscription of 1346 CE) run into the fourteenth century — the 'long southern afterlife' with early northern extinction is the book's headline result. The predicted shares are arithmetic over Basham's own testimonia tables; the multi-century north-south gap and the post-1250 southern series are stated facts in it.

• A.L. Basham, History and Doctrines of the Ajivikas: A Vanished Indian Religion (Luzac, 1951), Part III on the southern Ajivikas and the inscriptional record

Predictions

No prediction registered yet.