The poem keeps to the road

Claim (verbatim)

Prapanca's Desawarnana (Nagarakretagama, 1365) narrates King Hayam Wuruk's 1359 royal progress through eastern Java station by station, and presents itself as the work of a court official who rode along. A panegyric assembled later from memory or convention orders places by rank, rhyme or formula; a poem worked up from a travel record orders them by road. The itinerary cantos should therefore be road-true to a degree no ceremonial ordering would produce — the poem's celebrated documentary value is, at bottom, a testable property of its stop sequence. Prediction: restricting to progress toponyms identified independently of the poem (from Old Javanese charters and located temple or site remains, per Pigeaud's commentary and Robson's notes), the rank correlation between textual order of stops and geographic order along the reconstructed eastward route will exceed 0.9, with fewer than one in ten consecutive textual pairs requiring a backtrack of more than roughly 25 kilometres (primary clause: the rank correlation above 0.9; the verdict follows it). Kill: the toponym identifications in Pigeaud, Java in the Fourteenth Century, vol. IV (1962) and Robson, Desawarnana (Nagarakrtagama) by Mpu Prapanca (1995), joined to modern coordinates for the independently located sites.

Prediction clause (verbatim)

Prediction: restricting to progress toponyms identified independently of the poem (from Old Javanese charters and located temple or site remains, per Pigeaud's commentary and Robson's notes), the rank correlation between textual order of stops and geographic order along the reconstructed eastward route will exceed 0.9, with fewer than one in ten consecutive textual pairs requiring a backtrack of more than roughly 25 kilometres (primary clause: the rank correlation above 0.9; the verdict follows it).

Kill-dataset (verbatim)

Kill: the toponym identifications in Pigeaud, Java in the Fourteenth Century, vol. IV (1962) and Robson, Desawarnana (Nagarakrtagama) by Mpu Prapanca (1995), joined to modern coordinates for the independently located sites.

Novelty / leakage triage

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

The 1359 progress route has been reconstructed from the poem's toponyms since Krom and Pigeaud, and archaeological-geodetic work continues to trade on the itinerary's documentary reliability; the direction is thus fully anticipated, but the road-order fidelity has never been cashed as a rank correlation against independently located sites.

• T.G.T. Pigeaud, Java in the Fourteenth Century: A Study in Cultural History, vol. IV (Nijhoff, 1962)
• S.O. Robson, Desawarnana (Nagarakrtagama) by Mpu Prapanca (KITLV Press, 1995)
• A. Gomperts, A. Haag & P. Carey, 'The Archaeological Identification of the Majapahit Royal Palace', Journal of the Siam Society 102 (2014)

Predictions

No prediction registered yet.