The flood divides two arithmetics

Claim (verbatim)

The Sumerian King List, in the Old Babylonian recension best represented by the Weld-Blundell prism (Ashmolean AN1923.444), is two genres welded at the flood notice: an antediluvian cosmological table and a postdiluvian dynastic register. The antediluvian compilers had no archival substrate — no year-names or dynastic records reached behind the flood — so they generated reign-lengths from the sexagesimal round-number arithmetic of scribal schooling; the postdiluvian register, built to legitimate real dynasties down to Isin, inherited numbers with archival friction that resist rounding. The seam should therefore be arithmetically sharp, sitting exactly at the flood line rather than fading over the early legendary dynasties. Prediction: among all numerically preserved reign-lengths on the Weld-Blundell prism and its duplicates, the share exactly divisible by 600 will be at least five times higher before the flood notice than after it, and the drop will occur at the flood line itself, not within the first postdiluvian dynasty (primary clause: the antediluvian-to-postdiluvian divisibility-share ratio is at least 5; the verdict follows it). Exact computation: extract every preserved reign figure from the CDLI transliterations of the Sumerian King List witnesses, tag each as antediluvian or postdiluvian, and run a binomial test of divisibility by 600 against the postdiluvian empirical rate. Kill: the CDLI catalogue exports and transliterations of the Sumerian King List witnesses, above all the Weld-Blundell prism (Ashmolean AN1923.444), controlled against the score in Jacobsen's The Sumerian King List (Assyriological Studies 11, 1939).

Prediction clause (verbatim)

Prediction: among all numerically preserved reign-lengths on the Weld-Blundell prism and its duplicates, the share exactly divisible by 600 will be at least five times higher before the flood notice than after it, and the drop will occur at the flood line itself, not within the first postdiluvian dynasty (primary clause: the antediluvian-to-postdiluvian divisibility-share ratio is at least 5; the verdict follows it). Exact computation: extract every preserved reign figure from the CDLI transliterations of the Sumerian King List witnesses, tag each as antediluvian or postdiluvian, and run a binomial test of divisibility by 600 against the postdiluvian empirical rate.

Kill-dataset (verbatim)

Kill: the CDLI catalogue exports and transliterations of the Sumerian King List witnesses, above all the Weld-Blundell prism (Ashmolean AN1923.444), controlled against the score in Jacobsen's The Sumerian King List (Assyriological Studies 11, 1939).

Novelty / leakage triage

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

Borderline-leaked: the schematic, transparently sexagesimal character of the antediluvian reign-lengths vs the more archival postdiluvian register is a standard observation since Jacobsen; but the specific operationalization (divisibility-by-600 share >=5x higher before the flood notice, seam exactly at the flood line, binomial-tested) was not located.

• T. Jacobsen, The Sumerian King List (Assyriological Studies 11, 1939)

Predictions

No prediction registered yet.