The Red Sea Breathes Twice

Claim (verbatim)

Ge'ez literature is a pressure gauge on the Red Sea. Works entered Ethiopic in two pulses matching political connectivity and almost never in between: an Aksumite pulse, roughly 340-700, translating Greek (the Scriptures, the Qerellos dossier, the Physiologus, monastic rules) after Frumentius's mission; then silence through the post-Aksumite contraction; then a Solomonic pulse after 1270, translating the Arabic models of Copto-Arabic Egypt, institutionalized under the metropolitan Abba Salama, called the Translator (d. 1388). First-translation lag into Ethiopic is therefore bimodal by source language: Greek-sourced works cluster before 700, Arabic-sourced after 1270, and the interval 700-1270 contributes almost nothing - a two-stroke engine, not a steady stream.

Prediction clause (verbatim)

Prediction: among translated Ge'ez works whose entry into Ethiopic is datable at least to the century, at least 80% fall either before 700 CE (overwhelmingly Greek-sourced) or after 1270 (overwhelmingly Arabic-sourced), with fewer than 5% attributable to 700-1270; source-language sorting is sign-consistent, Greek dominating the early pulse and Arabic the late pulse in every half-century bin; coverage guard: at least 60 datable translated works across the two named catalogues, else inconclusive.

Kill-dataset (verbatim)

Kill: Zotenberg's Catalogue des manuscrits ethiopiens de la Bibliotheque nationale (1877) and Dillmann's catalogue of the Ethiopic manuscripts in the British Museum (1847), both on archive.org - tabulate every work the cataloguers mark as translated, with source language and datable entry, and bin by century.

Novelty / leakage triage

already answered in the literature

The two-pulse structure of Ge'ez translation literature — an Aksumite pulse from Greek (Scriptures, the Qerellos dossier, the Physiologus) and a Solomonic pulse from Arabic after 1270, with near-silence between — is the organizing framework of every standard history of Ethiopic literature, stated plainly rather than merely implied, and the claim's particulars (Frumentius, Abba Salama the Translator, d. 1388) are accurate. Crucially, the pinned census is circular: the century-datings of most translated works in Zotenberg's and Dillmann's catalogues and in the literary histories derive from the pulse model itself, since undated translations are routinely assigned to one pulse or the other on linguistic and source-language grounds. Tabulating the catalogues would therefore recover the model that generated the datings, and the 80-percent outcome is effectively guaranteed in located print. Leaked: an accurate claim, but one already stated and structurally incapable of surprising.

Predictions

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