The Saharan Archive as Stress Test: Confabulation and Paleographic Possibility in a Neglected Manuscript Tradition

The Saharan manuscript tradition inverts misguided intuitions about "low-resource" regions of intellectual production. In fact, the Sahara is a region of extraordinary manuscript wealth and scholarly production, with thousands of volumes across family libraries and a nomadic civilization rooted in mobile knowledge transmission. Notwithstanding, the Saharan archive remains minimally catalogued, scarcely digitized, virtually unattested in LLM training corpora. This poverty of learning is the machine's, not the archive's. Drawing on in situ research on Saharan intellectual history, this paper reports two lines of inquiry conducted with frontier models, set against an exemplary archive of digitized microfilms at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

I begin with a stress test. Trained overwhelmingly on printed and born-digital text, models probed on reception history, scholarly networks, and bibliography in this tradition fail in a characteristic way: fluency inversely tracks reliability. They produce inauthentic if mimetic Islamicate prose, plausible-enough transmission chains, and confected dialectic precisely where training data is thinnest. In a field of plausible-sounding lineages and attributions, deadly nonsense can escape notice. The philologist's inherited disciplines of source criticism and transmission-evaluation turn out to be the working method for using these systems at all, after all.

Moreover, the Stewart microforms of Mauritanian mss at Urbana-Champaign, now digitized and with (occasionally) attributed hands, make a paleographic pilot testable. Can vision-capable models, taught explicit diagnostic criteria, triage manuscripts by regional script type (Andalusī, Maghribī, ṣaḥrāwī/shinqīṭī)? Harder still, can they sort unattributed leaves by scribal hand better than chance, at measurable levels of confidence, against adversarial cases like teacher-student stylistic continuity? What becomes findable matters: women's copying and annotation, legal-network geographies, visual graphs of modal logic applied to theology. I present this as experiment design and early probing, not results, offered by a scholar still learning how to put models to work beyond the chat window, and arguing that neglected traditions are the true test of whether a pre-print AI ecosystem serves the whole pre-print world or only its well-digitized provinces.