An Oxyrhynchus in the Gobi

Status: Anticipated · untested

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).

This is a proposed connection between two domains, generated by a language model. It is not an article and not evidence: it sits below the evidence/publication boundary. A quantitative prediction and a named kill-dataset are attached (when registered) so the claim stays falsifiable rather than merely evocative.

Claim (verbatim)

Papyrology turned everyday paperwork into demography: from tens of thousands of dated Egyptian documents, it measured how long contracts, receipts, and letters were kept before being discarded, yielding retention curves for ordinary writing. The Dunhuang library cave in western China preserved thousands of dated Chinese and Tibetan documents — loan contracts, club circulars, land deeds — but it is treated as a Buddhist deposit with secular flotsam, not as an archive with a lifecycle. I conjecture that the age-at-deposition profile of Dunhuang's dated secular documents follows the same exponential retention decay as Egyptian town archives, with a comparable half-life of a few decades. The mechanism is that the retention of everyday documents is governed by the practical lifetime of the obligations they record — debts, leases, memberships — which is set by human lifespans and transaction horizons, not by culture or medium. If this holds, everyday documentary writing had a universal retention economy across Eurasia, and any excavated archive's age profile can be read against a single master curve.

Prediction clause (verbatim)

The distribution of document age at deposition (deposit horizon minus internal date) for dated secular documents from the Dunhuang cave will fit an exponential decay with a half-life between 25 and 60 years. Primary clause (the verdict follows it): the fitted half-life lies in the 25-60 year band with an exponential model preferred over a uniform model by AIC. Secondary clause: a two-sample Kolmogorov-Smirnov test against the Oxyrhynchus documentary age-profile does not reject identity at p > 0.05.

Kill-dataset (verbatim)

The International Dunhuang Programme (IDP) database of dated Dunhuang secular documents, with papyri.info dated documentary papyri as comparator; kill is a statistical test (distribution fitting and two-sample KS test).

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. Kills and priors are credited here, by name, as they come in.

In the atlas

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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

The dated-document distribution of Cave 17 is central to the deposit-theory debate (Stein's 'sacred waste' vs Rong Xinjiang's library thesis), so the age profile is an anticipated object of analysis, but no exponential retention-decay fitting or KS comparison to Egyptian documentary age profiles was located — and the Egyptian retention baseline itself lacks a synthetic quantitative study.

Predictions

No prediction registered yet.

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