AI-generated conjecture · a wager, not a finding
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The named years with nothing dated in them
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 Assyrian state dated its years by eponyms (limmu), each year named for an official, preserved as a continuous canon for the early first millennium (Alan Millard, SAAS 2, 1994, The Eponyms of the Assyrian Empire 910-612 BC). The canon is an unbroken year-list; the dated documentary record that should hang off it is sparse and clumpy. A chronology-list is complete by construction - every year has a name - while the tablets bearing those year-names survive only where an archive happened to be buried and dug. So the eponym canon is a full denominator against which recovered dated tablets are a thin, uneven numerator, and the empty years are a direct count of documentary loss. The mechanism is that a curated chronological framework is preserved as a unit for its own sake, whereas the mass of dated business documents is preserved only by the accidents of archive burial and excavation.
Prediction clause (verbatim)
Prediction: match the eponym names of the canon (910-612 BCE) against eponym date-formulae on recovered Neo-Assyrian tablets (CDLI plus ORACC/SAA); the median recovered-tablet count per canonical eponym-year is <= 5, and at least 25 percent of canonical years have <= 1 surviving dated document (primary clause: the fraction of eponym-years with <= 1 dated tablet >= 0.25). Disambiguation: eponyms are matched by normalized name, with homonymous eponyms disambiguated by their canon position; a 'dated tablet' bears an eponym date-formula. Coverage guard: attestation clusters around reigns with excavated capitals (Kalhu, Nineveh), so report the distribution's skew - empty years may be unexcavated rather than under-documented.
Kill-dataset (verbatim)
Kill: the eponym canon (Millard, SAAS 2) set against CDLI Neo-Assyrian dated tablets (the in-house copy holds 7,615 Neo-Assyrian rows) and ORACC/SAA date-formulae. Runnable this week in-house for a first pass; full CDLI plus SAA for completeness.
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
Millard's canon supplies the complete year-list denominator and PNA registers per-eponym attestations, and the clustering of dated Neo-Assyrian documents around the excavated capitals is a commonplace of the archive literature; but the per-eponym-year dated-tablet histogram and the fraction of canonical years with <= 1 surviving dated document were not located as published arithmetic. The in-house register logs only the Neo-Assyrian row count (7,615), not the eponym join, so the primary clause is unmeasured and un-run.
- A. Millard, The Eponyms of the Assyrian Empire 910-612 BC (State Archives of Assyria Studies 2, Helsinki, 1994)
- The Prosopography of the Neo-Assyrian Empire, ed. K. Radner and H.D. Baker (Helsinki, 1998-2011)
Predictions
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