Spells travel in convoys

Claim (verbatim)

The Theban recension of the Book of the Dead — the New Kingdom form of the work, before the Saite recension froze a canonical spell order — was assembled workshop-by-workshop from master rolls holding fixed runs of spells, not spell-by-spell to a patron's order. The economics of funerary book production demand it: workshops pre-copied long stretches on speculation, personalizing only the name of the deceased; a patron bought length and quality grades, not a bespoke anthology. Sequence memory in the surviving papyri is therefore workshop memory, and the work's apparent fluidity should resolve into a small set of convoy-like spell-runs rather than a continuum of free orderings. Prediction: in the per-witness spell sequences of Dynasty 18–20 Book of the Dead papyri, adjacency frequencies of spell pairs will be strongly bimodal — most ordered pairs either adjacent in over 60% of witnesses containing both spells or in under 10% — and the witnesses will cluster into fewer than ten sequence families covering over 80% of Theban exemplars (primary clause: bimodality of the adjacency-frequency distribution against a null of independent per-witness ordering, tested with a dip statistic; the verdict follows it). Kill: the witness-by-witness spell-sequence records published by the Bonn Book of the Dead project, Das altägyptische Totenbuch: ein digitales Textzeugenarchiv (totenbuch.awk.nrw.de).

Prediction clause (verbatim)

Prediction: in the per-witness spell sequences of Dynasty 18–20 Book of the Dead papyri, adjacency frequencies of spell pairs will be strongly bimodal — most ordered pairs either adjacent in over 60% of witnesses containing both spells or in under 10% — and the witnesses will cluster into fewer than ten sequence families covering over 80% of Theban exemplars (primary clause: bimodality of the adjacency-frequency distribution against a null of independent per-witness ordering, tested with a dip statistic; the verdict follows it).

Kill-dataset (verbatim)

Kill: the witness-by-witness spell-sequence records published by the Bonn Book of the Dead project, Das altägyptische Totenbuch: ein digitales Textzeugenarchiv (totenbuch.awk.nrw.de).

Novelty / leakage triage

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

Workshop production and fixed spell-runs (master rolls) in the New Kingdom Book of the Dead are established (Munro; the Bonn Totenbuch project's sequence work), but the specific statistical prediction (bimodal spell-pair adjacency + <10 sequence families covering >80% of Theban witnesses) was not located.

• I. Munro, studies of Book of the Dead workshop production; Totenbuch-Projekt Bonn

Predictions

No prediction registered yet.