That's a lovely script. Really quite mysterious. Reminds me of graph theory and topology.
I wonder if you can do some kind of weird frequency distribution analysis to classify what the extent specimens may be referring to.
I mean given some old civilization, is there a guassian like distribution of say X% documents being financial, Y% religious and so on?
And if there is, can you somehow classify these samples into camps and then maybe get to some confidence interval that one pile is likely say, political statements such as laws.
If you can get say a commerce/accounting pile, your known plaintext is pretty constrained. There's probably some bookkeeping and itemization and maybe some mathematics. Especially if there's addition or subtraction on there. It may not look anything like how we do it: could be concentric circles or something wild but arithmetic is generally the same. X + Y >= (X or Y) - even in systems where they just use a term "many", some really basic rules will still hold
For the religion you have feasts, calendars, holy days, etc. Maybe there's domain specific characters given this approach
The problem is with some cultures, we know that this approach does not work. There was.. is a tendency for example among pious muslims to burn all books except the quoran at the end of life, to express ones devotion.
So this approach would dig up only one book.
Now imagine a budhistic precursor, which shuns world possesions and clingyness to status, scribbling notes of debt on papyrus. And you simply get nothing, but mythologic temple inscriptions. Which only help you, if you can derive the follow up mythologies of the successor cultures. A connection you can only arrive after you know.
> There was.. is a tendency for example among pious muslims to burn all books except the quoran at the end of life, to express ones devotion.
Do you have an example of notable examples of this in history? or a source of such events? I've never heard of such a case before, so it's quite interesting.
This is more about scribes being attached to their jobs so preventing the use of printing-press. That's nothing holy or religion related. Good old protectionism.
I am also confused what this has to do with the original statement. Quran as a book has a form of disposal, yes, and it's by burning, sure. Your point was about non-Quranic books.
> And in various scholar articles. Notice that its also a attempt to have cohension and prevent the forming of sects and cults.
Similarly, again, that is about religious texts and religious books.
Honestly, I am not sure where you got your claim from. As far as I can research, there isn't some widespread practice of "tendency for example among pious muslims to burn all books except the quoran at the end of life" ...
There's likely not countless deviations. Religious zealotry can yield a different distribution, ok now we have 2.
There's a lot of antiquarian languages and civilizations. Even if there's a third possibility, it's worth seeing if the documents can be clustered in various fairly predictable proportions.
I can't be the first to think of this, it's just too obvious
I wonder if you can do some kind of weird frequency distribution analysis to classify what the extent specimens may be referring to.
I mean given some old civilization, is there a guassian like distribution of say X% documents being financial, Y% religious and so on?
And if there is, can you somehow classify these samples into camps and then maybe get to some confidence interval that one pile is likely say, political statements such as laws.
If you can get say a commerce/accounting pile, your known plaintext is pretty constrained. There's probably some bookkeeping and itemization and maybe some mathematics. Especially if there's addition or subtraction on there. It may not look anything like how we do it: could be concentric circles or something wild but arithmetic is generally the same. X + Y >= (X or Y) - even in systems where they just use a term "many", some really basic rules will still hold
For the religion you have feasts, calendars, holy days, etc. Maybe there's domain specific characters given this approach