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Chola CPI
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)
Chola CPI. Joins index-number theory — the chained construction behind the modern consumer price index — to Tamil temple epigraphy. Thousands of dated Chola-era endowment inscriptions record in stone the rates of paddy, ghee, and oil required to keep a temple lamp burning in perpetuity; because the deliverable (one lamp, forever) is constant, the quoted rates are repeated price observations on a fixed basket, exactly what an index requires. Chained across dates and places, they yield a computable medieval South Indian price index. The link to politics is war finance: the great campaigns and temple-building programs of Rajaraja I and Rajendra I pumped extraordinary expenditure into the economy, and that should surface in the index as inflation episodes. The conjecture predicts prices at least doubling across the eleventh century, with the steepest decadal rises inside the campaign decades and near-stability afterwards, and with regional sub-indices agreeing in direction for every episode.
Prediction clause (verbatim)
A chained index built from paddy-per-kalam and ghee/oil-per-ulakku rates in dated inscriptions 900-1250 CE shows a cumulative price rise of at least 100% across the 11th century, with the steepest decadal increases inside 985-1070 (the Rajaraja I and Rajendra I campaign and temple-building decades), followed by near-stability (under 1% per year trend) in 1070-1150. Regional sub-indices (Kaveri delta versus Tondaimandalam) agree in sign for every episode.
Kill-dataset (verbatim)
Kill: rate quotations in South Indian Inscriptions / Epigraphia Indica volumes for dated Chola records. A flat 11th-century index, or inflation concentrated away from the campaign decades, kills it.
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
Generated by a fresh Fable-tier instance at maximum effort with generation-first blindness (no repo reads, no searches, no DB queries); title list supplied at launch, titles only, no verdicts or dossiers seen; prompt pre-committed in docs/GOAL_CONJECTURES_BATCH2_20260705.md (7e55eb8). Novelty unverified by construction.
Novelty / leakage triage
anticipated in the literature — this exact test has never been run
Extracting price/market structure from South Indian temple inscriptions is an established program (Hall's price-making studies; a referenced Karaikkal 1000-1300 commodity-price compilation), and single-inscription price quotations are attested; a chained multi-commodity index across the Chola era tested against campaign chronology was not located.
- Hall 1977, 'Price-Making and Market Hierarchy in Early Medieval South India' — The inscriptional price-analysis precedent
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