Ur III Bureaucrats Audit the Scottish Witnesses

Claim (verbatim)

The Ur III state of Mesopotamia (around 2100 BCE) left roughly a hundred thousand administrative tablets, and Assyriologists learned to reconstruct its bureaucratic hierarchy statistically — disambiguating names and inferring rank from who appears with whom, and in what position, across thousands of documents. Medieval Scottish charters, encoded person by person in the People of Medieval Scotland database, contain the structurally identical data type: witness lists, where co-occurrence and list position encode social rank. I conjecture that the Ur III co-occurrence hierarchy detector, transferred without modification, will blindly recover the Scottish social order — earls above sheriffs above local landholders — from list structure alone, and that the witness network's small-world statistics will match the Umma administrative network's within a narrow band. The mechanism is that face-to-face administrative elites of a given scale generate the same network geometry: rank determines who is summoned to attest, and attestation frequency plus positional precedence encode rank redundantly. If this holds, bureaucratic sociality has an invariant statistical shape across four thousand years, and witness lists anywhere become a rank-measuring instrument that needs no titles to calibrate it.

Prediction clause (verbatim)

A hierarchy score computed purely from witness-list co-occurrence and position in the People of Medieval Scotland charters will correlate with independently known title rank at Spearman rho >= 0.7. Primary clause (the verdict follows it): the rho >= 0.7 blind rank recovery. Secondary clause: the witness network's clustering coefficient falls within 25% of the value computed for the Ur III Umma administrative network from BDTNS.

Kill-dataset (verbatim)

The People of Medieval Scotland database (poms.ac.uk) with BDTNS Ur III prosopographic data as comparator; kill is a statistical test (Spearman correlation of blind rank scores against known titles).

Novelty / leakage triage

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

Social network analysis of PoMS witness lists is extensively published, including co-witnessing networks and centrality as an index of status (Hammond 2014; the PoMS SNA volume), so hierarchy-from-witness-lists is operationalized; the blind Ur III-style rank-recovery correlation and the small-world comparison to the Umma network in BDTNS are un-run.

Predictions

No prediction registered yet.