Technical, recipe, and scientific texts

This page gathers the pre-print world's practical and technical writing: recipe collections, agronomic manuals, herbals, and astronomical catalogues -- material valued for what it could do rather than for literary merit, and correspondingly easy to lose once its specific instructions went out of use.

Reconstructed contents of Hipparchus's lost star catalogue is the strongest published case: a reconstruction of the star catalogue behind Hipparchus's lost original, at Quotient 44/100 with existence warrant 88 and reconstruction dependence 80 both substantial -- a text known only through what later astronomers quoted from it. Technical-recipe stratum behind Papyrus Holmiensis and Leiden X gives a second, more source-dependent case: a technical-recipe layer reconstructed behind two related papyri, at Quotient 30/100, where direct attestation 28 stays low even as existence warrant 82 holds up. Johnson Papyrus illustrated herbal source tradition and Diophanes of Bithynia agronomic source-chain inferon keep an illustrated herbal tradition and an agronomic source-chain open as unresolved leads rather than settled cases.

The linked conjectures test technical material against real mathematics and astronomy. Horoscope stemmatics builds a family tree of horoscope calculations the way a manuscript stemma would, and Censored skies asks whether omens tied to celestial events were selectively recorded only when politically convenient. History starts in the margin of Easter and Easter tables recopy the choir both test whether Easter-dating tables left a measurable trace on other kinds of writing kept nearby them, from marginal history notes to choir repertoire.