Omens fill the grid

Claim (verbatim)

The great omen series — liver divination, celestial omens — swelled over a millennium from hundreds of entries to many thousands, and the standard picture calls this accumulated observation: generations of diviners logging what they saw. Chemistry offers a rival model: once Mendeleev had a table, elements were predicted to fill its gaps before anyone observed them. The conjecture: omen-series growth was grid infilling — new entries generated to complete logical permutations of left and right, up and down, colours and counts — so late additions are theory-driven slots, many describing configurations never seen and some physically impossible, while the actually consulted omens stayed a small stable core. If it holds, Babylonian divination becomes a systematic science of a possibility space rather than an empirical archive, and the ratio of listed to consulted omens measures the theoretical ambition of each era.

Prediction clause (verbatim)

Comparing Old Babylonian omen collections with first-millennium recensions of the same series, protases attested only in the late recensions will appear in actual practice documents (extispicy reports and queries, astronomical reports to the king) at less than half the rate of protases already attested in the Old Babylonian layer, normalized for entry counts. Primary clause, which decides the verdict: the attestation-rate ratio (late-only versus early-attested) is below 0.5 with a significant difference at p<0.01. Secondary clause: more than 70 percent of late-only entries complete an existing binary or quaternary paradigm within their tablet.

Kill-dataset (verbatim)

ORACC (omen-series editions together with the Neo-Assyrian extispicy queries and astrological reports in the state-archives corpora).

Novelty / leakage triage

already answered in the literature

Searched omen-series growth and systematization. That the series expanded by systematic permutation (left/right, above/below), covering possibility space with unobserved and physically impossible omens, and that theorization superseded observation, is explicitly published in the divination literature; the practice-document attestation-rate test is new packaging.

• Annus (ed.), Divination and Interpretation of Signs in the Ancient World, ISAC OIS 6 (2010)
• De Zorzi, Top-Middle-Base: A System of Omen Sequencing and its Interpretation in Barûtu Chapter 3 and in Old Babylonian Precursors

Predictions

No prediction registered yet.