AI-generated conjecture · a wager, not a finding
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The lost shelf of romances
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Claim (verbatim)
The verse romance - the mathnavi of lovers, the versified tale - was a major genre of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, and it is a genre defined by its casualties. A few survive whole and canonical: Gurgani's Vis u Ramin (mid-eleventh century), the story that stands behind the whole Persian romance tradition. A few survive by a thread: Ayyuqi's Varqa u Gulshah lives in a single illustrated manuscript in the Topkapi library, and no second copy is known. Many survive only as titles and a stray couplet: Unsuri's Vamiq u Adhra recovered from a book-binding, his Khing-but u Surkh-but and Shadbahr gone entirely, and a long roll of further romances catalogued by Safa and de Blois that no manuscript preserves. The mechanism is the fragility of the long narrative poem as a physical object - a single fat codex, expensive to copy, with no liturgical or scholastic institution to guarantee its reproduction, so that one lost manuscript is often the whole work lost. Prediction restated: among the verse romances attested before about 1150 in the standard reference bibliographies, those surviving as substantially complete texts are a small minority - most of the shelf is titles and fragments, and the survivors owe their lives to lucky single copies.
Prediction clause (verbatim)
Prediction: of the verse romances (mathnavi tales) attested as composed before c. 1150 in de Blois' Persian Literature: A Bio-Bibliographical Survey and Safa's Tarikh-i adabiyat, fewer than one in four will survive as a substantially complete text with a corpus reachable on Ganjoor or in a printed edition; the remainder survive as titles or fragments only (primary clause: the substantially-complete survival share below 0.25 among pre-1150 attested romances; the verdict follows it). A romance counts as surviving only on a substantial continuous text, not a quoted excerpt, and the test voids if fewer than 15 pre-1150 romances are attested in the bibliographies. Nizami's later quintet is outside this window and is not counted.
Kill-dataset (verbatim)
Kill: the romance entries in de Blois' Persian Literature: A Bio-Bibliographical Survey and Safa's Tarikh-i adabiyat dar Iran as the attested-title census, each scored complete / fragment / title-only against Ganjoor (ganjoor.net) and the printed-edition record.
Nobody has run this test. The kill-data is named above. If you can run it — or you know the paper that already settles it — claim the kill or submit the prior scholarship. Kills and prior scholarship are credited here, by name, as they come in.
Provenance
Run: Fresh agent generation · model: claude-fable-5
Fresh blind generation by claude-fable-5, 2026-07-17, Persianate wave instrument-anchored on the open Ganjoor corpus (ganjoor.net) with the Cambridge Shahnama Project as the second instrument where manuscript transmission is the question. Every Kill names one corpus and one countable/positional/citation-geometric operation, thresholds sit far from 1, disambiguation and name-matching rules are pinned inside each prediction, and coverage guards separate what Ganjoor holds (print-era critical editions) from what existed. DISJOINTNESS: the Nizami/Khamsa transmission ground and de Blois vol. V's Nizami dated-manuscript census are owned by minds-w02 (item 'The Khamsa is bound, not born') and are NOT re-posed here; the Rumi Masnavi return-formula operation on Ganjoor is owned by minds-w02 and avoided; the Ferdowsi age-statement / reign-boundary operation on the Ganjoor Shahnameh is owned by minds-w01 ('The Shahnameh keeps the poet's birthdays') and the Shahnama interpolation-topography / illustrated-extent / folio-grid / dispersal / defacement operations are owned by fable-w01 (#14), fable-w03 (#24) and fable-w05 (#3,#4,#11) on the Cambridge Shahnama Project - so the Daqiqi item here reuses the Ganjoor Shahnameh and Cambridge Shahnama instruments ONLY under a distinct survival-by-embedding operation, flagged in its Kill; prose Kalila wa Dimna transmission is owned by fable-w01 (#22) and fable-w07 (#11,#22), so the verse-Kalila point is folded into the Rudaki item and no standalone Kalila/Sindbad-nama item is posed. Safa's Tarikh-i adabiyat and de Blois' Bio-Bibliographical Survey are reused as census controls under attested-poet/attested-title operations distinct from the minds-w02 Nizami dated-ms count. NOTE cleared: the 'Mu'jam' in islamicate-openiti (#4) is Yaqut's geographical Mu'jam al-buldan, a different work from Shams-i Qays's prosody al-Mu'jam used here - no collision. DROPPED CANDIDATES: (a) Nizami's own lists / khamsa-imitation chains of lost romances - dropped as Nizami is owned by minds-w02; recast as the non-Nizami verse-romance census (item 12). (b) A standalone Sindbad-nama / verse-Kalila item - dropped, prose Kalila owned by fable-w01/w07; the verse-Kalila loss folded into item 1. (c) A raw-bayt genre-size comparison (three Ghaznavid panegyrists vs one lyricist) - dropped as FALSE on the numbers (Farrukhi's surviving divan alone is large), replaced by the within-Ganjoor pre-Mongol survival-concentration op (item 6). (d) A smooth recency-gradient census - replaced by the mechanistic Mongol-caesura step (item 4). CONFIDENCE FLAGS carried inside the items: Rudaki's 100,000-couplet attestation and 'Unsuri's ~30,000-bayt divan are classical topoi (kept out of the load-bearing clauses, which rest on the hard surviving counts); the exact women-poet roster and the Khayyam cross-attribution magnitude are MODERATE and primary clauses are phrased to survive the uncertainty.
Novelty / leakage triage
anticipated in the literature — this exact test has never been run
The census exists in print: de Blois's survey and Safa catalogue the early narrative poems title by title with survival status - Vis u Ramin whole, Varqa u Gulshah on a unique Topkapi manuscript, 'Unsuri's three reduced to fragments or bare names, and a roll of further titles with no text. What print does not fix is the fraction: the sub-0.25 complete-survival share depends on enumeration and scoping judgments (what counts as a romance rather than an epic or didactic mathnavi, and what as attested) that can move the ratio across the threshold, so the answer is derivable-but-not-stated rather than guaranteed, and the tabulation has not been run.
- F. de Blois, Persian Literature: A Bio-Bibliographical Survey, vol. V (2nd rev. ed., London, 2004), the per-title inventory of early narrative poems
- Z. Safa, Tarikh-i adabiyat dar Iran, vols I-II, catalogues of attested and lost mathnavis
- 'Ayyuqi, Varqa va Gulshah, ed. Z. Safa (Tehran, 1343sh/1964), from the unique Topkapi manuscript
Predictions
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