← All conjectures · Islamicate book cultures
Finished on Friday
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).
“Anticipated in print” means the direction of this claim already appears in scholarship, while this exact test has never been run — it records prior art, not proof; nothing here counts as supported or falsified until a registered resolution says so.
Claim (verbatim)
Finished on Friday. This connects the colophon's weekday with devotional time-keeping in the workshop. Completion of a copy was an event, and the khatma carried blessing; a scribe nearing the end of the final quire could steer the finish to a blessed day, and had reason to when the book itself was sacred. If completion was steerable, the weekday distribution in colophons should be non-uniform with a Friday peak, and the steering should be strongest for Qurʾans, prayer books, and hadith, weakest for grammar, medicine, and commercial jobs, giving a measurable piety gradient running straight through the copying trade.
Prediction clause (verbatim)
Among colophons recording a weekday, Friday's share is at least 1.7 times the uniform expectation (at least 24.5% against 14.3%). Primary clause: the Friday share at or above 1.7x uniform; the verdict follows it. Secondary: the Friday excess for Qurʾans and devotional works is at least double the Friday excess for grammar, medicine, and secular poetry.
Kill-dataset (verbatim)
Kill: FIHRIST colophon transcriptions and the FiMMOD corpus (Fichier des manuscrits moyen-orientaux datés), which record complete colophon dates including weekdays.
In the kill-dataset registry:
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.
On Inferpedia
This conjecture is linked to the following pages on Inferpedia, an encyclopedia of the missing — working atlas pages, some still early scaffolding.
Provenance
Run: Fresh agent generation · model: claude-fable-5
Generated by a fresh Fable-tier instance (claude-fable-5) at maximum effort with generation-first blindness (no repo reads, no web searches, no DB queries); 218-title list supplied at launch, titles only, no verdicts/dossiers seen; prompt pre-committed in docs/generated/conjectures_1001_wave_ledger.md and docs/generated/conjecture_fresh_fable_w03_prompt_20260708.txt. Wave W03 of docs/GOAL_CONJECTURES_1001_CAMPAIGN_20260708.md. Novelty unverified by construction.
Novelty / leakage triage
anticipated in the literature — this exact test has never been run
Colophon scholarship already observes that completion was often planned for a Friday, so the direction is anticipated qualitatively, but the quantified Friday share (>=1.7x uniform) and the piety gradient across genres have not been measured.
Predictions
No prediction registered yet.
Weigh in
No community feedback yet.
New here? Create an account first
Create an account or sign in and your feedback is tied to you — you can track it, get replies, and claim this conjecture so others know you’re working on it. Prefer not to? Just leave your take below as a guest — only the name you type is shown.
Add your take
Posted immediately (spam is removed). Community feedback is never an adjudicated verdict and never changes this conjecture's triage label or status above.