Six centuries, one greeting

Claim (verbatim)

Sogdian merchant writing survives in three chronological islands: the Ancient Letters (undelivered mail of c. 313 CE from Stein's watchtower T.XII.a west of Dunhuang), the Mugh archive of Dewashtich's chancery (Zarafshan highlands, c. 722), and the Turco-Sogdian letters of ninth-to-tenth-century Dunhuang. Across six centuries the letters run one epistolary machine: hierarchical address to the noble lord, self-abasing sender formula, health-wish, business body, dating clause. The claim: the formulary was the diaspora's cohesion technology — trust across four thousand kilometres ran on recognizable form — so its slot structure should persist across the three islands at a fidelity no drifting oral convention would show. Prediction: slot-coding every sufficiently preserved letter in the three corpora against the opening template of the Ancient Letters, at least 70% of Mugh letters and at least 60% of the Dunhuang letters will realize four or more of the five slots in canonical order, with the hierarchical-address slot present in at least 90% of legible openings in all three corpora (primary clause: the 70% Mugh slot-match rate; the verdict follows it). Kill: Reichelt's Die soghdischen Handschriftenreste des Britischen Museums II (1931) with Sims-Williams' re-editions of the Ancient Letters; Sogdiiskie dokumenty s gory Mug II-III (Livshits; Bogolyubov and Smirnova; Moscow 1962-1963); Sims-Williams and Hamilton, Documents turco-sogdiens du IXe-Xe siecle de Touen-houang (Corpus Inscriptionum Iranicarum, 1990).

Prediction clause (verbatim)

Prediction: slot-coding every sufficiently preserved letter in the three corpora against the opening template of the Ancient Letters, at least 70% of Mugh letters and at least 60% of the Dunhuang letters will realize four or more of the five slots in canonical order, with the hierarchical-address slot present in at least 90% of legible openings in all three corpora (primary clause: the 70% Mugh slot-match rate; the verdict follows it).

Kill-dataset (verbatim)

Kill: Reichelt's Die soghdischen Handschriftenreste des Britischen Museums II (1931) with Sims-Williams' re-editions of the Ancient Letters; Sogdiiskie dokumenty s gory Mug II-III (Livshits; Bogolyubov and Smirnova; Moscow 1962-1963); Sims-Williams and Hamilton, Documents turco-sogdiens du IXe-Xe siecle de Touen-houang (Corpus Inscriptionum Iranicarum, 1990).

Novelty / leakage triage

already answered in the literature

Benkato's monograph is a systematic comparative study of the Sogdian epistolary formulary across the corpora, and his published conclusion is the conjecture's claim: formulae present in the Ancient Letters recur in the Mugh documents and later Turfan/Dunhuang letters, maintained over several centuries and far from Sogdiana. Only the slot-percentage operationalization is new; the persistence finding itself is in print.

• A. Benkato, Studies on the Sogdian Epistolary Tradition (Berliner Turfantexte XLI, Brepols, 2018)
• A. Benkato, 'Sogdian Letter Fragments in the IOM, RAS', Written Monuments of the Orient (2021)

Predictions

No prediction registered yet.