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The long weekend at Deir el-Medina
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Claim (verbatim)
The long weekend at Deir el-Medina. Absenteeism econometrics has two robust modern findings: absence hazard spikes on workdays adjacent to rest days, as workers manufacture long weekends, and total absence is dominated by a small cadre of chronic absentees. This conjecture claims the pharaoh's own tomb-builders behaved identically three thousand years earlier. The Deir el-Medina attendance registers record the royal workmen's presence across the Egyptian ten-day week; if labour-supply psychology is invariant across millennia, absence probability on the final workday before the rest days should run nearly double the mid-week average, exactly as it does before modern Fridays. Likewise, individual absence counts should be strongly overdispersed rather than evenly spread, with the top tenth of workmen carrying at least forty percent of all recorded absences. A uniform daily hazard and an even distribution of absence across workmen would kill it.
Prediction clause (verbatim)
In the attendance registers, absence probability on the final workday before the rest days is >= 1.8x the mid-week average; individual absence counts are overdispersed (negative-binomial k < 1) with the top decile of workmen accounting for >= 40% of all recorded absences; a uniform daily hazard and an even distribution across workmen kill it.
Kill-dataset (verbatim)
Kill: the Deir el-Medina Database (Leiden) attendance ostraca, O. BM 5634 and parallels.
On Inferpedia
This conjecture has been linked to the following subject pages on Inferpedia — an encyclopedia of the missing, now in limited preview.
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
already answered in the literature
The absence registers are a famous quantitative dataset with a direct scholarly lineage: Janssen's foundational 1980 study of the Year-40 register (280 days, 40 workmen, per-absence reasons) and Austin's 2015 quantitative 'scalar approach' reanalysis — quantitative absenteeism analysis of this exact corpus is established. The conjecture's specific instruments (weekday hazard curve, negative-binomial overdispersion, top-decile concentration) were not located, but the connection is a standing research program.
- Janssen 1980, 'Absence from Work by the Necropolis Workmen of Thebes', SAK 8 — The foundational quantitative study
- Austin 2015, 'Accounting for Sick Days', JNES 74.1 — Modern quantitative reanalysis
Predictions
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