AI-generated conjecture · a wager, not a finding
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The findspot the market erased
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)
A tablet's provenience - its excavated findspot - is the anchor of nearly everything we infer about where writing happened. In the in-house CDLI copy, 15,046 of 126,000 rows (11.9 percent) have no recorded findspot: bought on the market, looted, or long detached from context. Looting is selective; it targets the sites and object-classes that sell, so the provenance-null fraction is not evenly spread but concentrated in the collectible - and where it concentrates, it silently distorts the geographic and generic map of cuneiform. The tablets from nowhere are not a random sample of the tablets from somewhere. The mechanism is that the antiquities trade both strips context and skews toward high-value classes, so unprovenanced status co-varies with genre and object-type rather than being a neutral gap.
Prediction clause (verbatim)
Prediction (in-house CDLI copy): the provenience-null fraction is >= 10 percent overall (in-house: 11.9 percent) and is at least 2 times higher among the collectible classes - Literary, 'Official or display,' and cylinder seals - than among Ur III administrative tablets, which mostly come from documented excavations (primary clause: collectible:Ur-III-administrative provenience-null ratio >= 2). Disambiguation: provenience-null = empty origin field (populated in-house from CDLI provenience, kept distinct from the holding collection); classes from the genre and artifact-type fields. Coverage guard: some Ur III administrative tablets are themselves unprovenanced market pieces (the Drehem trade), so report that subset explicitly to confirm the contrast is genre-driven and not an artefact of one archive.
Kill-dataset (verbatim)
Kill: the CDLI provenience/origin field cross-tabulated with the genre and artifact-type fields - provenience-null rate by 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
The overall clause is the generator's own measurement (provenience-null 11.9 percent, threshold pinned at >= 10) and is dead as evidence by self-measurement; the designated primary by-class ratio >= 2 is unregistered and unpublished. The contrast class is factually shaky, though: Molina's corpus overview quantifies that the bulk of Ur III tablets reached collections through the market rather than documented excavation, with provenience assigned on internal criteria, so provenience-null is a weak proxy for excavation exactly where the item needs it strong - the coverage guard only partly absorbs this.
- 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: 15,046 of 126,000 rows provenience-null
- M. Molina, 'The Corpus of Neo-Sumerian Tablets: An Overview', in S.J. Garfinkle and J.C. Johnson (eds.), The Growth of an Early State in Mesopotamia: Studies in Ur III Administration (Madrid, 2008)
- N. Brodie, 'The Market in Iraqi Antiquities 1980-2009 and Academic Involvement in the Marketing Process', in S. Manacorda and D. Chappell (eds.), Crime in the Art and Antiquities World (New York, 2011)
Predictions
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