The stolen library was new

Claim (verbatim)

On 20 June 1812 British and sepoy troops stormed the kraton of Yogyakarta, and Crawfurd, Mackenzie and Raffles carried off the court's books and papers — the only moment a working Southeast Asian court library was frozen whole rather than burned, and therefore the region's best core sample of what such a library actually contained. The conjecture reads the sample against the recopying treadmill: a court library in a tropical chirographic economy is a current collection, not an archive; its holdings are perpetually young because copying is how books exist at all. Yogyakarta is the clean test because the court itself was founded only in 1755, after Giyanti split Mataram — an institution 57 years old at the seizure — yet it fielded a full canonical library of babad, wayang literature, Islamic learning and law. If the treadmill model is right, that completeness was manufactured within living memory: the seized volumes, now mainly in the British Library and digitized in the 2019 Javanese Manuscripts from Yogyakarta project, should be overwhelmingly copies made at the young court itself, with only a thin residue of older heirloom volumes carried over from Kartasura and Surakarta — antiquity being something these libraries continuously shed, not stored. Prediction: among the digitized kraton manuscripts with assignable copy dates from colophons, dated chronograms or watermarks, over three quarters will fall in the 57-year window 1755-1812, fewer than one in twenty will predate 1730, and the babad texts will run to the very eve of the assault (primary clause: the three-quarters share inside 1755-1812; the verdict follows it). Kill: the British Library's Javanese Manuscripts from Yogyakarta digitisation project (75 manuscripts, digitally repatriated 2019), with Ricklefs and Voorhoeve's Indonesian Manuscripts in Great Britain (1977) and Carey's The Archive of Yogyakarta (1980, 2000) as controls.

Prediction clause (verbatim)

Prediction: among the digitized kraton manuscripts with assignable copy dates from colophons, dated chronograms or watermarks, over three quarters will fall in the 57-year window 1755-1812, fewer than one in twenty will predate 1730, and the babad texts will run to the very eve of the assault (primary clause: the three-quarters share inside 1755-1812; the verdict follows it).

Kill-dataset (verbatim)

Kill: the British Library's Javanese Manuscripts from Yogyakarta digitisation project (75 manuscripts, digitally repatriated 2019), with Ricklefs and Voorhoeve's Indonesian Manuscripts in Great Britain (1977) and Carey's The Archive of Yogyakarta (1980, 2000) as controls.

Novelty / leakage triage

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

The seized Yogyakarta library is catalogued (Ricklefs & Voorhoeve 1977; Carey's Archive of Yogyakarta) and digitized (British Library, 2019), and Carey has long characterized it as a working court collection; that the court was founded only in 1755 is not in doubt. But the primary clause is a copy-date demography - over three quarters of datable manuscripts inside the 1755-1812 window, under one in twenty before 1730 - and that tabulation across the assignable colophons, chronograms and watermarks has not been compiled and stated. The collection trivially postdates nothing after 1812, but the manufactured-within-living-memory share is un-run arithmetic. Adjacent.

• P.B.R. Carey, The Archive of Yogyakarta, vol. I (Oxford: Oxford University Press for the British Academy, 1980)
• M.C. Ricklefs & P. Voorhoeve, Indonesian Manuscripts in Great Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977)
• British Library, Javanese Manuscripts from Yogyakarta digitisation project (75 manuscripts, digitally repatriated 2019)

Predictions

No prediction registered yet.