Network topology and centrality

Remove the right ten people from a social network and the whole thing falls apart; remove ten random people and nobody notices. This page gathers conjectures that redraw historical relationships as exactly that kind of network -- jurists citing jurists, hadith transmission chains reaching back to the Prophet, vassal courts naming their overlords, letters preserved only because a recipient chose to keep them -- and then ask the same structural questions a web cartographer asks of the internet: who is a hub, does the network have a compact core that everything else feeds into, and does authority flow recursively along links the way a search engine ranks pages by who links to whom.

The isnad bowtie and The jurists' PageRank both look for a hub-and-bowtie structure in a transmission network -- hadith transmission chains (isnads), citing jurists -- the same shape web cartographers find in the internet. Tin percolation collapse and Hillfort mesh networks test whether a physical or economic network -- a tin-trade route, hillforts built in sight of one another -- has the connectivity structure a deliberate network, rather than scattered independent points, would predict. The donor is a hub tests whether a single well-documented donor functions as a genuine hub tying together an otherwise loosely connected set of records.