The oldest literature, the youngest books

Claim (verbatim)

Campā has the deepest literate pedigree in Southeast Asia — its epigraphy opens in the fourth century with the earliest attested text in any Austronesian language, and runs for over a millennium through Sanskrit and Old Cham — yet its manuscript corpus is the youngest of any major regional literature: the extant Cham manuscripts, in akhar thrah script on paper, are essentially all products of the last three centuries. The conjecture ties the inversion to custodial catastrophe rather than climate alone. Manuscript survival in the tropics requires an unbroken chain of institutional recopying; Campā's chain was cut repeatedly and terminally — the fall of Vijaya in 1471, the long contraction to Panduranga, the final Vietnamese annexation of 1832 — leaving the classical literature that the inscriptions' Sanskrit learning presupposes with no custodian, while the surviving corpus restarts from the post-classical, Islamized-and-localized culture of the rump principality. The classical library of Campā should therefore be recoverable to exactly zero: not one witness of any work attested in the classical epigraphic record, and no physical carrier predating the Panduranga era, in any collection, French or Vietnamese. Prediction: across the French holdings catalogued by Lafont, Po Dharma and Nara Vija and the community collections digitized by the British Library's Endangered Archives Programme, zero Cham manuscripts will carry copy dates before 1600, fewer than one in twenty will predate 1800, and no manuscript anywhere will transmit a text attested in classical Campā's epigraphy (primary clause: the zero-before-1600 census; the verdict follows it). Kill: P-B. Lafont, Po Dharma and Nara Vija, Catalogue des manuscrits cam des bibliothèques françaises (EFEO, 1977), with the EAP Cham manuscript digitisation collections (EAP531) at the British Library.

Prediction clause (verbatim)

Prediction: across the French holdings catalogued by Lafont, Po Dharma and Nara Vija and the community collections digitized by the British Library's Endangered Archives Programme, zero Cham manuscripts will carry copy dates before 1600, fewer than one in twenty will predate 1800, and no manuscript anywhere will transmit a text attested in classical Campā's epigraphy (primary clause: the zero-before-1600 census; the verdict follows it).

Kill-dataset (verbatim)

Kill: P-B. Lafont, Po Dharma and Nara Vija, Catalogue des manuscrits cam des bibliothèques françaises (EFEO, 1977), with the EAP Cham manuscript digitisation collections (EAP531) at the British Library.

Novelty / leakage triage

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

That Cham manuscripts are all recent - akhar thrah on paper, essentially post-seventeenth-century - while classical Campa's learning survives only epigraphically is standard, and Lafont, Po Dharma and Nara Vija's 1977 catalogue is the dated record. But the primary clause is a census - zero manuscripts dated before 1600, fewer than one in twenty before 1800, none transmitting a classically attested text - and that distribution has not been tabulated and stated as such across the French holdings plus the EAP531 community collections. The qualitative youth is in print; the numeric before-1600 census is un-run. Adjacent.

• P.-B. Lafont, Po Dharma & Nara Vija, Catalogue des manuscrits cam des bibliotheques francaises (Paris: EFEO, 1977)
• British Library Endangered Archives Programme, EAP531 Cham manuscript digitisation collections

Predictions

No prediction registered yet.