AI-generated conjecture · below the evidence/publication boundary
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Plague churns the flyleaf
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)
Plague churns the flyleaf. This connects book provenance with demographic catastrophe. Every owner's death sends a book to the estate division and often to the market; mass mortality is therefore legible as accelerated turnover on flyleaves. The Black Death and its recurrences in the Mamluk lands should compress the intervals between successive dated ownership notes for roughly two generations, because books were changing hands on mortality's schedule rather than scholarship's, and the used-book market of Cairo and Damascus was flooded with dead men's libraries precisely when the pool of buyers had also thinned, accelerating resale chains further.
Prediction clause (verbatim)
For manuscripts circulating in Egypt and Syria, the median interval between successive dated ownership and transaction notes falling in 1350-1430 CE is at least 30% shorter than the median interval for notes falling in 1250-1340 CE, with the compression fading by 1450-1500. Primary clause: the 30%-or-greater median interval compression in 1350-1430; the verdict follows it.
Kill-dataset (verbatim)
Kill: FIHRIST and Chester Beatty Library catalogue provenance fields, which transcribe dated ownership notes on Mamluk-provenance codices, with Süleymaniye records as a second sample.
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 has been linked to the following subject pages on Inferpedia — an encyclopedia of the missing, now in limited preview.
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
Mamluk book-market history (Behrens-Abouseif) and dense ownership-note corpora (Liebrenz) exist, and estate dispersal at death is a known channel, but measuring interval compression between dated ownership notes across the Black Death window has not been done.
Predictions
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