AI-generated conjecture · a wager, not a finding
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Forgery has a genre
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)
CDLI flags known forgeries in an is-fake field. In the in-house copy exactly 160 of 126,000 rows (0.127 percent) are so flagged - a small stock, but forgery is not sprinkled at random. Forgers make what sells: the market pays for royal inscriptions, literary and religious 'treasures,' and cylinder seals, not for broken administrative receipts. So the fake-rate should track collectibility, and the flagged fakes should pile up in the high-prestige, high-price genres and object-types while the administrative bulk stays clean. The pattern of caught forgery is thus a readout of what the antiquities market most wants to counterfeit. The mechanism is economic: forgery effort follows resale value, which is concentrated in the display, literary, and glyptic classes, not in bureaucratic ephemera.
Prediction clause (verbatim)
Prediction (in-house CDLI copy): the per-row fake-rate among 'Official or display' (royal and monumental), Literary, and Prayer/Incantation genres, and among seal artifact-types, is >= 5 times the fake-rate among Administrative tablets (primary clause: prestige-genre:administrative fake-rate ratio >= 5). Disambiguation: fake-rate = flagged fakes divided by total rows within each genre or artifact-type class; classes are read from the genre and artifact-type fields. Coverage guard: with only 160 flagged fakes the per-cell counts are small, so require >= 20 fakes across the prestige classes combined for the test to resolve, else void; and note that the flag records DETECTED forgeries, so the pattern is of forgeries caught - a lower bound on forgeries attempted.
Kill-dataset (verbatim)
Kill: the CDLI is-fake field cross-tabulated with the genre and artifact-type fields - fake-rate by prestige class. Runs THIS WEEK in-house.
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
That forgers target the prestige classes - royal inscriptions, literary and religious pieces, seals - is documented at length in the forgery literature (Muscarella's catalogue of Near Eastern forgeries; the Michel-Friedrich volume on faked written artefacts), and the generator self-measured the flagged-fake count (160 rows, 0.127 percent, stated in the item); but the designated primary clause, the prestige:administrative fake-rate ratio >= 5 on CDLI's is-fake field, is not among the registered aggregates and no published cross-tab of the flag by genre was located, so the one live clause is un-run.
- O.W. Muscarella, The Lie Became Great: The Forgery of Ancient Near Eastern Cultures (Groningen, 2000)
- C. Michel and M. Friedrich (eds.), Fakes and Forgeries of Written Artefacts from Ancient Mesopotamia to Modern China (Studies in Manuscript Cultures 20, Berlin, 2020)
- In-house CDLI catalogue copy (126,000 rows, about 30 percent of CDLI's 421,501 artifacts, harvested 2026-07-04), the wave's own registered aggregates: 160 flagged fakes of 126,000 rows
Predictions
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