AI-generated conjecture · a wager, not a finding

The syllabus written in copy-counts

Status: Already answered

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).

This is a proposed connection between two domains, generated by a language model. It is not an article and not evidence: it sits below the evidence/publication boundary. A quantitative prediction and a named kill-dataset are attached (when registered) so the claim stays falsifiable rather than merely evocative.

Claim (verbatim)

House F at Nippur is not a library but a teaching cycle caught in the ground: a single Old Babylonian scribal school excavated with about 1,400 literary and school tablets, catalogued and analysed by Eleanor Robson (RA 95, 2001). Its compositions cluster by curricular stage - the elementary Tetrad and the intermediate Decad (ten Sumerian classics, among them Shulgi A, Lipit-Eshtar A, and the Song of the Hoe, defined by Steve Tinney) drilled first and hardest, advanced compositions copied by only a few pupils. Teaching multiplies copies of what everyone must learn: a beginner text is written out by every student, an advanced text by a handful. So within one school the extant copy-count per composition is a fossil of curricular position - a loss-and-abundance signal readable entirely inside the Old Babylonian Nippur corpus, with no appeal to first-millennium survival. The mechanism is pedagogical redundancy: curricular centrality drives the number of copies produced, and therefore the number that could survive.

Prediction clause (verbatim)

Prediction: rank House F's identified compositions by curricular tier (Tetrad/Decad versus the House-F advanced group and rarer pieces); the median extant copy-count per Decad composition exceeds the median for advanced compositions by a factor >= 3 (primary clause: Decad:advanced copy-count ratio >= 3), decreasing monotonically across tiers. Disambiguation: copies are counted as distinct House F manuscript exemplars per composition (Robson's catalogue / DCCLT Nippur); tiers follow Tinney and Robson. Coverage guard: exclude the elementary sign and name exercises, which are not compositions, and report whether the ratio survives dropping the single most-copied composition.

Kill-dataset (verbatim)

Kill: Robson's House F tablet catalogue (published) and ORACC DCCLT's Nippur literary manuscripts - copy-count per composition by curricular tier. Feasible this week on the published data.

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

already answered in the literature

Robson's House F publication already tabulates copy-counts per composition by curricular group - the RA 95 tables give each Decad composition dozens of House F exemplars against a handful for the advanced pieces, with the curricular tiering established by Tinney - so the >= 3 median tier ratio is guaranteed arithmetic on her published tables, precisely the field-leak the check anticipated. Only cosmetic re-runs (DCCLT manuscript sigla, the drop-one-composition robustness check) remain.

E. Robson, 'The Tablet House: A Scribal School in Old Babylonian Nippur', RA 95 (2001), tables of tablets per composition
S. Tinney, 'On the Curricular Setting of Sumerian Literature', Iraq 61 (1999)

Predictions

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