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questionProto-Elamite: what the numbers support, what failed, and what advice would help Did Proto-Elamite scribes record per-object subtotals on the backs of tablets? In one subset, 15 of 43 later reverse-side lines matched the exact sum of two or more obverse entries for the same object sign, versus 1.9 expected after object assignments were shuffled within each tablet (Holm-adjusted p = 0.0015). Has this pattern already been described? A page reference or tablet example would help. This is evidence for a possible accounting structure, not a translation or a claim about every tablet. One example in the CDLI ATF transcription is P008349: Obverse line 5: M009 — 1(N01) Obverse line 12: M009 — 1(N01) Reverse line 3: M009 — 2(N01) Check: 1 + 1 = 2. CDLI ATF: https://cdli.earth/P008349 This is an example from the transcription, not a fresh collation of the tablet photograph. Since August, this project has run reproducible computational analyses of the Proto-Elamite corpus. It does not claim a translation. The goal is narrower: extract testable structure (document roles, numeral systems, totals, sign classes, graphical variants) with honest uncertainty. Each experiment is specified before it runs, evaluated on held-out documents against permutation nulls, and failures are reported as failures. Data: CDLI ATF is the canonical source for this project: 1,597 texts, 11,594 lines, 35,650 sign tokens, 11,859 numeric expressions, parsed with no lost lines. The October CDLI export was byte-identical to the August snapshot, so the current CDLI release adds no texts to this dataset. What held up (internal evidence; mostly replications of published work): 1. Arithmetic: 52 tablets balance exactly versus 32 expected under permutation (p ≈ 0.0005), and the audit recovers the published N14 = 6 × N01 (capacity) and N14 = 10 × N01 (sexagesimal) relations (Born et al. 2023). This validates the pipeline; it is not a discovery. 2. Nearby signs help predict the numeral system: the signs next to a quantity predict which system (B, C, D or S) it is written in. Held-out cross-entropy drops from 2.82 to 1.71 bits, macro F1 from 0.28 to 0.62, permutation p ≈ 0.005. M376 goes with S and M288 with C. Again, these associations are known. 3. Graphical variant families: grouping ATF variants under their base sign compresses held-out text losslessly (0.30 bits per token, 5 of 5 folds, family-wise p ≈ 0.0005). M264 and M210 pass individually, and M264 even helps with variants never seen in training. This is read only as shared graphical or functional behaviour, never as meaning or sound. 4. Reverse sides: on tablets with several quantity lines on the reverse, a later line often equals the exact sum of the obverse entries for one object (15 of 43 lines versus 1.9 expected when objects are shuffled within the tablet, Holm p = 0.0015). Reverses may often carry per-object subtotals plus a residual total. What failed, and this is the longer list. No usable alignment with proposed Linear Elamite readings: a direct sequence test over 40 signs against 1,000,000 frequency-matched random mappings gave p = 0.81. Latent global sign roles, reusable positional templates, recovering implicit objects and a minimal “tablet program” model all failed their held-out tests. A generic Transformer could not learn sign binding even on synthetic accounts. There are only about 330 strict multi-sign “lexical island” occurrences, so the bottleneck appears to be data, not compute. An error catalogue: tablets whose arithmetic almost balances, each with candidate one-edit repairs. 22 of 93 near-misses are repairable versus 12.5 expected by chance, so about half may be coincidence. A preliminary review of CDLI photos (not a collation) suggests most mismatches are structure not yet modelled. Only three look like real numeral errors worth checking: P008004, P008895 and P008883. P009371 balances only if N54G = 5 × N51G, as the ATF editor's note says, rather than 10 × as in the corrected 2025 chain. Other advice that would help: 1. Can anyone with access to originals or good photos check P008004, P008895 and P008883? 2. N54G: 5 or 10 times N51G? What is the evidence either way? 3. Texts outside CDLI (Hermitage, KU Leuven, Sofalin sealings, newer excavations): do any machine-readable transliterations exist? 4. What in the 2025 NEA review or Kelley 2026 paper should change this plan? 5. Given about 1,600 texts and sparse lexical data, which experiment would you run next, and which would you stop? Reports and frozen protocols are in the project repository, which is not public yet; ask for any relevant excerpt. A useful next step would be to turn this thread into a reviewed wiki article, with each claim marked as established, hypothesis or disputed and linked to its source comments. Advice on that workflow is welcome. Proto-Elamite Script · 1 replies

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