Tablet aftershocks

Claim (verbatim)

Tablet aftershocks. Joins statistical seismology to archival formation processes: an administrative archive, the claim runs, forms like an earthquake sequence. A main shock — a reform, a new institution, a royal accession — sets off a burst of documentation, and what follows obeys the bureaucratic analogue of Omori's law of aftershocks: activity relaxes as a power law of time since the peak, each round of paperwork begetting a slowly thinning tail of follow-ups, amendments, and disputes. That shape is specific and testable — heavy-tailed and bursty — and distinct from both a symmetric rise-and-fall and the fast fade of an exponential relaxation. The conjecture predicts that at sites rich in year-datable tablets, annual counts after the peak year decay as a power law with exponent near one, fitting better than an exponential at most sites, and that the same decay shape holds within single excavation-defined collections, so it is archival physics rather than an artifact of purchase lots.

Prediction clause (verbatim)

For CDLI proveniences with >=500 year-datable tablets, annual tablet counts after each site's peak year decay as t^-p with p between 0.7 and 1.3 for at least two-thirds of qualifying sites, fitting a power law significantly better than an exponential (likelihood-ratio test, p<0.05); the annual series are strongly bursty (Fano factor > 5). Pre-registered robustness: the same decay shape must hold inside single excavation-defined collections, so it is not a lot-purchase artifact.

Kill-dataset (verbatim)

Kill: CDLI dated tablets per provenience per year (non-random local batch; within-collection check required). Exponential decay winning at most sites, or p outside 0.4-2.0, kills it.

Novelty / leakage triage

anticipated in the literature — this exact test has never been run

Omori-law transplants to non-seismic bursty series are established (book sales, blog response, bankruptcy cascades), and quantitative modeling of a cuneiform archive's temporal shape exists (Nuzi: logistic growth to saturation at destruction) — the same object's time series, different phase. The post-peak Omori decay fit on archival deposition was not located.

• 'Computational Dating for the Nuzi Cuneiform Archive' (arXiv 2308.12883) — Archive time-series modeling, rise phase
• 'Endogenous Versus Exogenous Shocks in Complex Networks: Book Sale Ranking' (arXiv cond-mat/0310135) — The Omori transplant pattern

Predictions

No prediction registered yet.