The heirloom, the export, the treadmill

Claim (verbatim)

Malay literature is old — a Sumatran legal code, the Tanjung Tanah manuscript, radiocarbon-dated to the fourteenth century — yet the roughly ten thousand extant Malay manuscripts are overwhelmingly copies of the nineteenth century. The conjecture resolves the paradox into exactly three survival channels with distinct signatures. First, the sealed heirloom: Tanjung Tanah survived six centuries in Kerinci because it stopped being read and became pusaka, regalia in ritual custody. Second, the early export: the oldest circulating-literature witnesses are items that left the tropics within a century of European contact — the 1521-22 Ternate letters in Lisbon, the Erpenius manuscripts in Cambridge by 1632, the Laud Hikayat Seri Rama in Oxford by the 1630s. Third, the treadmill: everything that stayed in circulation in the region was recopied onto European paper in the great nineteenth-century boom and its ancestors were discarded, so in-region age bottoms out around 1700. Collection-era fires like the Fame, which burned off Bencoolen in 1824 with Raffles' library aboard — leaving of his collecting mainly what had already sailed, like the Royal Asiatic Society's Raffles Malay 18, the oldest Sejarah Melayu recension — only sharpened a distribution the three channels had already fixed. Prediction: in the British Library's fully digitized Malay manuscript corpus, fewer than ten items will carry copy dates before 1700 and none before 1600, with the modal copy decade falling 1800-1860; and globally, every Malay manuscript physically older than 1600 will prove to be either a European-archived export or a non-circulating heirloom, never a book from the living copying stream (primary clause: the BL demography with its sub-ten pre-1700 count; the verdict follows it). Kill: the British Library Digitised Manuscripts Malay collection (Gallop's digitisation project), controlled by Ricklefs and Voorhoeve, Indonesian Manuscripts in Great Britain (1977), and Uli Kozok, A 14th Century Malay Code of Laws (ISEAS, 2015).

Prediction clause (verbatim)

Prediction: in the British Library's fully digitized Malay manuscript corpus, fewer than ten items will carry copy dates before 1700 and none before 1600, with the modal copy decade falling 1800-1860; and globally, every Malay manuscript physically older than 1600 will prove to be either a European-archived export or a non-circulating heirloom, never a book from the living copying stream (primary clause: the BL demography with its sub-ten pre-1700 count; the verdict follows it).

Kill-dataset (verbatim)

Kill: the British Library Digitised Manuscripts Malay collection (Gallop's digitisation project), controlled by Ricklefs and Voorhoeve, Indonesian Manuscripts in Great Britain (1977), and Uli Kozok, A 14th Century Malay Code of Laws (ISEAS, 2015).

Novelty / leakage triage

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

The three channels and the youth of the Malay manuscript mass are textbook: Tanjung Tanah as sealed pusaka (Kozok 2015), the early European exports, and the nineteenth-century recopying boom are documented, and Malay codicology (Gallop; Ricklefs & Voorhoeve) knows the corpus is overwhelmingly nineteenth-century. But the primary clause is a specific demography of the British Library's digitized corpus - fewer than ten items dated before 1700, none before 1600, modal decade 1800-1860 - and that item-level date tabulation has not been published as a stated distribution. The mechanism is in print; the BL count is un-run arithmetic. Adjacent.

• Uli Kozok, A 14th Century Malay Code of Laws: The Nitisarasamuccaya (Singapore: ISEAS, 2015)
• M.C. Ricklefs & P. Voorhoeve, Indonesian Manuscripts in Great Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977)
• Annabel Teh Gallop, The Legacy of the Malay Letter / Warisan Warkah Melayu (London: British Library, 1994)

Predictions

No prediction registered yet.