# r2-edh-b1-09

**Claim (as registered):** Epitaph or votive inscription is the single largest genre category (the plurality genre) in at least 85% of eligible large provinces.

**Proposed mechanism:** Funerary and votive epigraphy are proposed to have dominated everyday inscriptional practice broadly across the Roman world -- a Mediterranean-wide cultural pattern, not confined to either the Latin-speaking West or the Greek-speaking East specifically. The city of Rome itself is excluded from this claim's scope (its unusually cosmopolitan, state/honorific-heavy epigraphy is a documented confound for genre-mix claims specifically).

**Scope:** Source: the Epigraphic Database Heidelberg (EDH), a catalogue of Roman-period inscriptions on stone/metal/etc. (physical objects, catalogued separately from a manuscript census). Training: the 33 provinces in the alphabetically first half of EDH's own province-code order (42,009 inscriptions). Holdout: the 33 provinces in the alphabetically second half, minus 'Provincia incerta' (EDH's own catch-all for uncertain findspots, not a real geographic unit, excluded from all arithmetic) -- 32 real provinces, 39,457 inscriptions -- landed in one complete fetch after the claim was fixed. EDH's own content has been fixed since 2021 (the cataloguing project's funding ended), so this holdout tests whether a pattern generalizes across an arbitrary alphabetical split of already-catalogued, unchanging material, not whether it predicts new discoveries. Minimum support: at least 150 genre-typed rows in a province; Rome excluded from scope.

**Training-side evidence:** 11 of 12 checked training provinces (91.7%) had epitaph or votive inscription as the plurality genre. The one disclosed exception's TRUE plurality genre (after correcting an earlier mischaracterization) is 'owner/artist inscription' (74 records, 25.4%, a clear win over the second-place genre), not the near-tie originally described.

**Holdout test and outcome:** Of 19 eligible holdout provinces, ALL 19 (100%) had epitaph as the plurality genre -- no exceptions at all in the holdout half.

**Status:** Survived every eligible holdout province.
