AI-generated conjecture · a wager, not a finding
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Authors catalogued, works uncatalogued
Status is derived only from the shepherd-authored triage/prediction data above -- community submissions and claims are a separate overlay and can never change it (see the participation panel below).
Claim (verbatim)
The Catalogue of Texts and Authors (W. G. Lambert, JCS 16, 1962) is a rare native Mesopotamian bibliography: a first-millennium list pairing compositions, cited by incipit, with named authors and sometimes ancestral scribal families - attributing works to figures such as Sin-leqi-unninni (Gilgamesh), Esagil-kin-apli, and Kabti-ilani-Marduk (Erra). A bibliography names more than survives, because attribution outlives text: the scholarly memory of who wrote what persists in lists after the works themselves stop being copied. So the Catalogue should enumerate compositions whose manuscripts have vanished - authors remembered for books we no longer have. The mechanism is the differential durability of metadata versus text: a one-line entry in a curated list is cheap to transmit and prestigious to keep, whereas the multi-tablet work it names is expensive to recopy and easy to lose.
Prediction clause (verbatim)
Prediction: of the compositions enumerated by incipit in the Catalogue of Texts and Authors, at least 35 percent have no securely identified recovered manuscript in ORACC or CDLI (primary clause: unrecovered-composition fraction >= 0.35). Disambiguation: a listed composition counts as recovered if its incipit matches an edited text in an ORACC project or a CDLI-catalogued literary/scholarly tablet; broken or ambiguous incipits are excluded from both numerator and denominator. Coverage guard: the Catalogue is itself fragmentary, so compute the fraction over securely-read entries only, and void the test if fewer than 30 legible incipits remain.
Kill-dataset (verbatim)
Kill: the Catalogue of Texts and Authors (Lambert 1962, with its re-editions in the Babylonian wisdom-literature tradition and ORACC where digitized) set against ORACC/CDLI incipit attestation.
Nobody has run this test. The kill-data is named above. If you can run it — or you know the paper that already settles it — claim the kill or submit the prior scholarship. Kills and prior scholarship are credited here, by name, as they come in.
Provenance
Run: Fresh agent generation · model: claude-fable-5
Fresh blind generation by claude-fable-5, 2026-07-17, cuneiform instrument-anchored wave against CDLI (including the in-house catalogue copy), ORACC, BDTNS, and Archibab: every Kill names a specific open corpus and a countable operation (catalogue-incipit vs recovered census, series colophon N-of-M completeness arithmetic, un-enrichment residue, directional letter-asymmetry, dated-histogram discontinuity, lexical-vs-documentary attestation gap, intake-vs-holdings, curricular copy-frequency, godlist-vs-cult, chronology-vs-attestation, forgery-by-genre, provenance-null-by-genre, letter tablet-census, and genre/period composition shares). Disjoint by construction from the 30 cuneiform conjectures of wave w22 (grep-checked per key name and per instrument-operation). In-house CDLI copy = 126,000 rows (about 30 percent of CDLI's 421,501), harvested 2026-07-04; exact in-house aggregates cited in the runnable-this-week items: genre-blank 10.4 percent, language-undetermined 14.3 percent, provenience-null 11.9 percent, flagged fakes 160 (0.127 percent), Administrative 70.9 percent, Ur III 47.4 percent, Old-Babylonian:Middle-Babylonian dated ratio about 8. Six items resolve THIS WEEK against the in-house copy (ordinals 3, 5, 11-partial, 12, 13, 15); two carry an honest 'Kill (not yet built)' where the cross-instrument join is real in sources but not yet a dataset (ordinals 6, 7, 14).
Novelty / leakage triage
anticipated in the literature — this exact test has never been run
Lambert's edition and his canonicity study state that the Catalogue attributes compositions otherwise unknown, and later identifications - Finkel's matching of the Sidu series is the type case - show the per-entry status is a moving published frontier; but the aggregate unrecovered fraction over securely-read incipits against ORACC/CDLI holdings is stated nowhere located, so the >= 0.35 arithmetic is genuinely un-run.
- W.G. Lambert, 'A Catalogue of Texts and Authors', JCS 16 (1962)
- W.G. Lambert, 'Ancestors, Authors, and Canonicity', JCS 11 (1957)
- I.L. Finkel, 'On the Series of Sidu', ZA 76 (1986)
Predictions
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