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The notarization threshold
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).
Claim (verbatim)
Modern legal systems set value thresholds for formality: above a statutory amount, contracts require notarization or extra witnesses. Old Babylonian contracts vary conspicuously in their formality — sealed or unsealed, three witnesses or ten — and the variation is usually attributed to local scribal custom. The conjecture: formality was priced, with an implicit threshold measured in silver above which sealing and elevated witness counts became near-obligatory, and that threshold was stable across cities and across a century — a shared procedural norm written in no law code, since the codes are silent on documentary formality. If it holds, statistics recover a layer of unwritten Babylonian procedural law, and the picture of formality as scribal whim breaks in favour of a norm as uniform as any statute.
Prediction clause (verbatim)
In Old Babylonian contracts with statable silver-equivalent values, the probability of a sealed tablet will rise sigmoidally with value, and logistic fits will place the midpoint threshold within a factor of 2 of each other across at least three cities and across early versus late Old Babylonian subperiods. Primary clause, which decides the verdict: the cross-city consistency of the fitted threshold within a factor of 2, with each city fit significant at p<0.01. Secondary clause: mean witness counts step upward by at least 2 above the fitted threshold.
Kill-dataset (verbatim)
Archibab (contract values, sealing status, and witness lists for Old Babylonian legal documents).
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
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Provenance
Run: Fresh agent generation · model: claude-fable-5
Composed blind by claude-fable-5 from internal knowledge only, with zero tool calls, and emitted directly as a single JSON text message.
Novelty / leakage triage
no prior formulation located (search dated 2026-07-10)
Searched formality (sealing, witness counts) vs. transaction value in OB contracts. Sealing clauses and witness-list practice are described in the legal-document literature, but no study fitting formality probability against silver value or claiming a cross-city stable threshold was located (search dated 2026-07-10).
Predictions
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