← All conjectures · Method, bridges & the corpus itself
Bestsellers of the Sahel
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)
Byzantinists can rank ancient Greek works by popularity because Pinakes counts surviving copies: a few texts survive in hundreds of manuscripts while most survive in one, and the shape of that concentration is a signature of the copying economy. The manuscript libraries of Timbuktu and the wider West African Sahel have now been catalogued in tens of thousands of records, but they are mined for individual treasures rather than profiled as a distribution. I conjecture that copies-per-work concentration in the West African Arabic corpus is measurably steeper than in the Byzantine Greek corpus — a madrasa-canon effect, because Sahelian copying was driven by a tight teaching curriculum (a small set of legal, grammatical, and devotional texts copied endlessly by students) rather than by patronage or library-building. The mechanism is curriculum-locked demand: when copying is pedagogy, the head of the distribution fattens and the tail thins. If this holds, the shape of a manuscript culture's copy-count curve becomes a readout of its educational structure, and the Sahel emerges as the most curriculum-driven copying economy yet measured.
Prediction clause (verbatim)
The Gini coefficient of copies-per-work computed over catalogued West African Arabic manuscripts will exceed the Gini coefficient of copies-per-work for classical and patristic Greek texts in Pinakes by at least 0.10. Primary clause (the verdict follows it): Gini(West African corpus) - Gini(Pinakes Greek corpus) >= 0.10, significant at p < 0.05 under bootstrap resampling. Secondary clause: the top 20 works account for at least 40% of all West African copies.
Kill-dataset (verbatim)
The West African Arabic Manuscript Database (AMMS/WAAMD) and vHMML West African collections, versus Pinakes copy counts; kill is a statistical test (bootstrap comparison of Gini coefficients).
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
Composed blind by claude-fable-5 with zero tool use, emitted as a single JSON text message per the fresh-lane blindness protocol.
Novelty / leakage triage
anticipated in the literature — this exact test has never been run
Hall & Stewart's core-curriculum reconstruction from ~21,000 West African manuscripts and Stewart's 31-library survey already quantify curriculum-driven concentration of copying, anticipating the claim's substance; the specific Gini-coefficient comparison against Pinakes Greek copy counts is un-run.
Predictions
No prediction registered yet.
Weigh in
No community feedback yet.
New here? Create an account first
Create an account or sign in and your feedback is tied to you — you can track it, get replies, and claim this conjecture so others know you’re working on it. Prefer not to? Just leave your take below as a guest — only the name you type is shown.
Add your take
Posted immediately (spam is removed). Community feedback is never an adjudicated verdict and never changes this conjecture's triage label or status above.