Becker in the Valley of the Kings

Claim (verbatim)

Becker in the Valley of the Kings. Joins the economics of crime — Gary Becker's principle that offenses rise when their returns rise and legitimate wages fall — to the Deir el-Medina archives of the royal tomb-builders. The workmen were paid in grain, and the ostraca record their ration arrears, strikes, and the price of emmer; the great juridical papyri record the tomb-robbery investigations of the late Twentieth Dynasty. The claim is that the famous Ramesside tomb-robbery scandals were at bottom a real-wage event: when rations failed and grain prices spiked several-fold, the calculus tipped for men who knew exactly where the gold lay. The conjecture predicts that every attested robbery investigation falls within a few years after a documented arrears, strike, or price-spike episode, that this clustering is far beyond chance across the late-Ramesside window, and that price peaks lead prosecutions rather than lag them — with no role for any change in policing.

Prediction clause (verbatim)

Every attested tomb-robbery investigation or trial year in the juridical papyri (P. Abbott, P. Leopold II-Amherst, P. Mayer A, the P. BM 10052-10054 cluster; regnal years of Ramesses IX-XI) falls within 5 years after a documented ration-arrears or strike year, or after an emmer price observation at >=2x the early-20th-Dynasty norm (prices rising from roughly 1-2 toward 8 or more deben per khar); under a uniform null across the roughly 90-year late-Ramesside window the clustering has p < 0.05, and price peaks lead prosecution clusters by 0-5 years, never lag them.

Kill-dataset (verbatim)

Kill: the Deir el-Medina ostraca grain-price and ration series (Janssen's compilation and successors) crossed with the dated robbery papyri. Robbery years uncorrelated with price and arrears years, or prosecutions systematically leading price spikes, kills it.

Novelty / leakage triage

already answered in the literature

The core join is standard Egyptological historiography: the late-Ramesside tomb-robbery wave is qualitatively linked to grain shortages, delayed rations, and price crisis (Ramesses IX narrative), and Janssen's canonical price series documents the underlying inflation. The statistical lead-lag test against the price series was not located, but the connection — robbery wave as real-wage event — is established, not new.

Predictions

No prediction registered yet.