The inner text withers as the registry grows

Claim (verbatim)

The Hellenistic 'double document' wrote a contract twice on one papyrus: a rolled and sealed inner text, tamper-proof, and an open outer text for consultation. This conjecture treats the sealed inner copy as do-it-yourself security whose size should track institutional trust in reverse: as public record offices took over authentication, scribes should let the inner text shrink from full duplicate to an abbreviated token before abandoning the format altogether, because nobody keeps writing a second copy whose security function an institution now performs. The shrinkage curve therefore measures, at decadal resolution, trust migrating from the physical object to the registry. If this holds, a proof-regime transition usually narrated from law codes becomes directly measurable as a word-count ratio on surviving sheets, sealed rolls and all.

Prediction clause (verbatim)

Primary clause: in papyri.info double documents, the median ratio of inner-text length to outer-text length declines monotonically by half-century from at least 0.8 in the third century BCE to at most 0.2 in the format's final phase. Secondary clause: the steepest segment of the decline coincides with the documented expansion of public registration offices rather than with any change of dynasty.

Kill-dataset (verbatim)

papyri.info: transcribed double documents (scriptura interior and exterior) with dates.

Novelty / leakage triage

already answered in the literature

The specific connection is published: papyrological accounts state the scriptura interior became a mere abstract once agoranomic/state registration authenticated the contract, and Yiftach-Firanko's 'Who Killed the Double Document in Ptolemaic Egypt?' (APF 54, 2008) makes registration the killer of the format.

Predictions

No prediction registered yet.