I suppose I was thinking more in terms of idempotency than persistence. N Shakespearean monkeys type:

   $> echo "A rose" > any_other_name
   $> git init
   $> git commit -a -m "Initial Commit"

There's one blob hash, one tree hash, and M commit hashes where M is the size of the set of the tuples of email addresses and author names among the monkeys.