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The legend dies before the horse
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)
The legend dies before the horse. Imitation coinages degrading over copy-generations — Celtic staters from Philip II's gold, sceattas from Roman types, Indian imitations of Kushan issues — are a numismatic classic. The unestablished universal is an order of decay: under illiterate copying, legend legibility collapses into pseudo-letters strictly before the image loses its first topological feature, in every independent tradition — because the engraver parses the image semantically but the legend only graphically, so text alone lacks perceptual error correction.
Prediction clause (verbatim)
Primary clause (the verdict follows it, categorical): in at least three independent imitation series ordered by their accepted typological sequences, the stage at which a majority of legend characters are non-letters precedes the stage at which the principal image loses its first topological feature (a limb detached, head separated from body, rider dissolved into the horse) in every well-attested series, with no counterexample. Secondary clause: weight standards outlast both, so metrology is the last fidelity to fail.
Kill-dataset (verbatim)
Kill: the Celtic Coin Index online (via Oxford and the Portable Antiquities Scheme) and the British Museum and Ashmolean Museum online coin collections.
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); 278-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_w05_prompt_20260708.txt. Wave W05 of docs/GOAL_CONJECTURES_1001_CAMPAIGN_20260708.md. Novelty unverified by construction. A platform output-limit resume occurred before the single Write; no additional tool calls or information ingress occurred.
Novelty / leakage triage
anticipated in the literature — this exact test has never been run
Imitation-series degeneration is a numismatic classic, and blundered pseudo-legends on coins whose types remain recognizable are a commonplace of the barbarous-imitation literature, anticipating the asymmetry; the strict cross-tradition ordering test (legend collapse before first topological image loss, no counterexample) is un-run.
Predictions
No prediction registered yet.
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