THE OBELUS AND THE TOMBSTONE: On the Two Marks of Custody, and the Erasure of Zenodotus at the Eponym Layer (EA-SIGIL-OBELUS-01 v1.0) is a text/markdown in the Crimson Hexagonal Archive, by Johannes Sigil (2026-07-11). Sometime around 284 BC, Ptolemy's librarians at Alexandria faced a problem that has never since left the custody of texts: the copies disagreed. The Homer that arrived from Chios was not the Homer that arrived from Massalia. Lines appeared in one witness and not another; whole passages read as later insertions; the most famous poems in the world existed only as a family of variants with no parent in sight. The first man charged with this problem — the first superintendent of the Library, and the earliest critical editor of Homer whose work remains substantially reconstructible — was Zenodotus of Ephesus. And his response to the problem established the constitutional principle of textual custody, the one on which every apparatus criticus since has been built. Zenodotus's instrument — the one the tradition credits him with introducing — was the obelus — a horizontal stroke set in the margin beside a line he judged spurious. The judgment was often severe; the mark never was. An obelized line stood condemned and remained in the text. The operation has a name, athetesis: to declare a passage not the author's while preserving it for every reader and every future editor to weigh. The mark says: I doubt this. Here is my doubt, signed. The line stays; you decide. That is the whole ethic of custody in a single stroke of ink — the custodian's suspicion must never be allowed to become the text's disappearance, because the custodian might be wrong, and the only insurance against a. — Article composed 2026-08-05 from the work's own prose so that every record carries an encyclopedic entry; a fuller editorial treatment belongs to the description/wiki review stream.