The king who ordered a font

Claim (verbatim)

Around the 890s the Khmer king Yasovarman I did something no ruler in the region repeated: he had monumental inscriptions cut digraphically — the same Sanskrit text twice over, once in the local Khmer script and once in an imported North-Indian-style script — like a state decreeing an official typeface. The conjecture joins script politics to training economics: script survival in early Southeast Asia was decided not by royal ideology but by the reproduction cost of scribal skill, so a top-down script imposition unsupported by a local teaching pipeline should die with its patron, however overwhelming his power, making the digraphic stelae a natural experiment on how writing systems actually spread. The mechanism is generational: a script lives only if somebody profits from teaching it to the next cohort. If it holds, the whole Pallava-script radiation must be reread — not kings adopting prestige alphabets, but self-sustaining teacher lineages — with the failed royal script as the exception that measures what the successful diffusion required.

Prediction clause (verbatim)

In the Khmer corpus, the imported northern-style script will be confined to a window of at most 35 years around Yasovarman I's reign and to foundations of his own program, will never appear carrying vernacular Khmer text, and will never be adopted by any non-royal patron after the reign. Primary clause: the 35-year, royal-program-only confinement; the verdict follows it.

Kill-dataset (verbatim)

The Cœdès / DHARMA Khmer inscription inventory (K-numbers — the standard Khmer epigraphic corpus): the dated distribution of the digraphic and northern-script inscriptions.

Novelty / leakage triage

already answered in the literature

The verdict-bearing primary clause is already a published result: the standard literature (from Coedes onward) states that Yasovarman I's imported North-Indian-style script appears only in his digraphic royal inscriptions and 'did not last beyond his own reign', never being adopted more widely — precisely the confinement the prediction tests. The training-economics rereading is fresh framing, but the operationalized result is established.

• Khmer script (Yasovarman I's northern-script introduction 'did not last beyond his own reign')
• Digraphic inscriptions of Yasovarman I (Kamvujaksara, K.362)

Predictions

No prediction registered yet.