Saved by the graft

Claim (verbatim)

Daqiqi (Abu Mansur Daqiqi Tusi, killed c. 366/976) began a versified Book of Kings for the Samanid court and had completed roughly a thousand couplets - the Gushtasp-nama, the coming of Zoroaster and the wars of Gushtasp - when he was murdered by his own slave. A generation later Firdawsi, taking up the same national project, did not paraphrase his predecessor: he set Daqiqi's thousand lines into the Shahnama bodily, framing them with an explicit apology - a dream in which Daqiqi appears and asks that the passage be preserved - and a frank critique of their quality. That editorial act is the reason Daqiqi is more than a bare name. The mechanism is survival-by-embedding: a poet's independent divan, dependent on fragile court copying, all but vanished, while the single long passage that a canonical, endlessly-recopied epic absorbed rode to safety inside its host. The consequence is a paradox of quantity - the borrowed, embedded fragment should be larger than everything independent transmission preserved of him. A poet survives best not through his own book but through someone else's monument. Prediction restated: the demarcated Gushtasp-nama section carried inside the Shahnama exceeds Daqiqi's entire separately-transmitted surviving corpus by a wide margin - the passage he did not choose to have copied is the majority of all the Daqiqi that now exists.

Prediction clause (verbatim)

Prediction: the demarcated Daqiqi (دقیقی) Gushtasp-nama passage embedded in the Shahnama - bounded by Firdawsi's transition couplets that name Daqiqi and reproduced on Ganjoor's Shahnameh text - will run to at least three times the total bayt count of Daqiqi's independently-transmitted corpus on his own Ganjoor author page (primary clause: the embedded-passage bayt count at least 3x the standalone Daqiqi corpus; the verdict follows it). The passage boundaries are read from Firdawsi's own framing lines, not from an editor's guess, and the test voids for coverage only if Ganjoor carries no separable Daqiqi author page.

Kill-dataset (verbatim)

Kill: the Ganjoor (ganjoor.net) Shahnameh, whose reign structure isolates the Daqiqi Gushtasp-nama section, counted against Daqiqi's standalone Ganjoor author corpus; the Cambridge Shahnama Project witness database is the secondary instrument confirming the graft's presence and extent are stable across manuscripts. This reuses the Ganjoor Shahnameh and Cambridge Shahnama instruments under a survival-by-embedding operation distinct from the Ferdowsi age-statement and interpolation-topography items owned by other waves.

Novelty / leakage triage

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

Both component counts are in print: the Gushtasp-nama graft is universally reported at about a thousand verses on Firdawsi's own statement, and Daqiqi's independently transmitted remains were collected by Lazard at a few hundred lines, with the survival-by-embedding reading a commonplace of the reference literature (Khaleghi-Motlagh's Iranica entry). But the primary clause is a >=3x ratio between two Ganjoor corpora, and the printed component figures put the true ratio close to that threshold (roughly 1,000 embedded against 300-350 standalone), so the outcome is genuinely unsettled rather than guaranteed. Nobody has run the division on the Ganjoor texts, and no published tabulation states the embedded-to-standalone ratio.

Predictions

No prediction registered yet.