← All conjectures · Eastern Christian book cultures
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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)
Almost no Ethiopic manuscripts survive from before 1300, although Christianity arrived in the 4th century and the Garima Gospels prove sophisticated late antique production. The claim: the gap is not termites, climate, or war but deliberate replacement — the Solomonic restoration of 1270 and the ensuing liturgical standardization retired and recycled the old books wholesale, so the survival curve should show a cliff at the reform rather than the smooth exponential decay that environmental loss produces, and the rare pre-1300 survivors should be objects that had crossed into relic status, kept as sacred things rather than as texts. The mechanism is that a reforming church destroys superseded service books as a duty, not a loss. If it holds, Ethiopia's 'missing' seven centuries sit inside later parchment as recycled material, and reform, not decay, is the great destroyer of manuscript cultures generally.
Prediction clause (verbatim)
Primary clause (verdict follows it): the date distribution of Ethiopic manuscripts fits a step/cliff hazard model with a break at 1270-1350 significantly better than a constant-hazard exponential (likelihood-ratio test on Beta maṣāḥǝft and EMML datings). Secondary: pre-1300 survivors are disproportionately Gospel books with documented cultic status.
Kill-dataset (verbatim)
Dated and datable manuscript records in Beta maṣāḥǝft and the vHMML EMML catalogue (the latter in-house).
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 blind by claude-fable-5 in a single Write from the inline prompt and existing-title list alone, with no file reads, web access, database queries, or any other tool call.
Novelty / leakage triage
anticipated in the literature — this exact test has never been run
The pre-1300 gap is a recognized problem with competing published explanations (16th-c. conquests, climate, use-wear-and-replacement of service books), and the early-Solomonic literary renewal is well documented — so the direction (replacement, not decay) is anticipated even if the 1270-cliff hazard-model version is un-run.
Predictions
No prediction registered yet.
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