The Apparatus Was the First Summary Layer is the transhistorical spine for provenanceerasure.org. The surface presents PER, M/C/D and Ω as measurements of what AI summary layers do to attribution — true, and radically undersized. Five cases from the philological record, each scored in the site's own vocabulary:
The headless treatise. Peri Hypsous is transmitted as Διονυσίου ἢ Λογγίνου — a disjunction, not a name; PER-M ≈ 1.0 on the author atom, and the erasure is legible as an erasure. The tenth century preserved its uncertainty; the retrieval layer manufactures false confidence — a worse deep-provenance outcome from a better-documented era.
Four named erasures at Sappho 31.17. Robortello 1554, Bergk 1882, Crusius 1897, Voigt 1971 — each a PER-D event against the demonstration while PER-M against Sappho stays 0: the name untouched, the mechanism deleted. The scalar cannot report that shape; the dimensions were built for it.
The silent re-Aeolicization. To print the trailing line as Sappho's, editors restore her dialect — and the restoration appears in no apparatus entry. A deep-provenance violation committed by the provenance apparatus itself: the repairing hand present in every accent, attributed in none.
The corpus. Fragment 31 has no independent witness; every Sappho we possess is downstream of a summary layer called quotation. The dominant erasure mode in both eras is non-carriage, not distortion — converging with the site's flat-absence finding.
The white stone. Rev 2:17 — a name legible to exactly one receiver: PER = 1.0 for everyone except one, by design. The instrument's limit case: PER measures a magnitude, not an injury; privacy is provenance that survives in one reader. And 22:18–19 legislates the other pole — δυσεξάλειπτος escalated from criterion to covenant.
The proposed labor-vector role-mapping is declined in the text as costume, with one sentence kept: the task has an origin — fr. 147, someone will remember us — task-origin Mytilene, before 570 BCE; everything since is execution.
Governing contrast: the apparatus erased with signatures and stated reasons; the summary layer erases anonymously at scale. The question was never whether provenance gets destroyed — it is whether the destruction has provenance.