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The flat curve of Assur
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“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)
The flat curve of Assur. The term structure of interest rates — the yield curve — normally slopes upward, because lenders demand compensation for longer exposure to risk. This conjecture says Old Assyrian merchant finance in the Kanesh trade refused that logic: interest in the Kultepe loan tablets was customary rather than market-clearing, a conventional rate near 30% per year applied regardless of how long the money was out, so annualized rates should be flat in maturity, with loan term explaining essentially none of the variation. Risk did not go unpriced; it migrated into contract design instead, so the odds of a punitive default-penalty clause should at least double with each doubling of loan term. The signature is a flat yield curve paired with a steeply term-sensitive penalty structure — the price of money fixed by custom, the risk of default priced in clauses. A conventional upward-sloping yield curve in the tablets kills it.
Prediction clause (verbatim)
Across >= 150 Kultepe loan tablets stating both rate and term, the regression of annualized interest on log maturity has a slope within +/-2 percentage points of zero (against a customary level near 30% per year) with R^2 <= 0.05, while the odds of a punitive default clause at least double per doubling of loan term; a conventional upward-sloping yield curve kills it.
Kill-dataset (verbatim)
Kill: the Old Assyrian Text Project loan corpus in the Larsen and Veenhof editions.
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
Generated by a fresh Fable-tier instance at maximum effort with generation-first blindness (no repo/web/DB access); titles-only knowledge of existing items, embedded in titles_supplied per the batch-2 lane rule; prompt pre-committed in docs/GOAL_CONJECTURES_BATCH3_20260705.md (b043140). Novelty unverified by construction. titles_supplied stripped to the committed sidecar conjecture_fresh_fablemax_batch3_titles_supplied_20260705.md at import (schema additionalProperties:false; relaxation queued).
Novelty / leakage triage
anticipated in the literature — this exact test has never been run
The Veenhof-school Old Assyrian credit literature richly documents the factual substrate (30-60% customary rates, monthly compounding, default escalation) and one Belleten article on interest-payment procedures is likely close (abstract-only in the dossier); the rate-vs-maturity yield-curve regression was not located as performed.
Sources cited by the triage
- Michel, 'The Old Assyrian Trade in the Light of Recent Kültepe Archives' — The credit-practice scholarship
- 'Interest payment procedures applied by Assyrian merchants', Belleten 69/255 (2005) — Closest single article; abstract-only
Predictions
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