Open Questions

Open Aleppo Codex

Why It Is Open The codex was in the Great Synagogue of Aleppo when it burned in the riot of December 1947 and reached Israel in 1958 with about two fifths of its leaves gone. The leaves were never observed to burn, and the surviving pages show no fire damage consistent with the loss. Two leaves have since surfaced from private hands, in 1982 and in 2007, which shows that at least some left Aleppo intact. Beyond that there is no established account. Competing suspicions have been aired, about the community in Aleppo, about those who carried the codex out, and about the institution that received it, and none has been tested to a finding. This is an absence rather than a scholarly dispute: no one holds a position that can be read and argued with.

What Would Settle It Provenance research in the archives of the parties who handled the codex between 1947 and 1958, including the Ben-Zvi Institute's own acquisition file and the Israeli state inquiry papers; and forensic examination of any further leaf that surfaces, since the two recovered so far were identified by matching parchment and hand.

Expertise Needed Manuscript studies and archival provenance research; Hebrew and Arabic; the modern history of the Syrian Jewish communities.

Question posed in The Aleppo Codex: A True Story of Obsession, Faith, and the Pursuit of an Ancient Bible, Matti Friedman.

Open Mar Saba Letter

Why It Is Open The leaves were removed from their printed volume at the library of the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate in Jerusalem after the examination of 1983 and have not been publicly produced since. Nobody has stated where they are. Every argument about the document, on both sides of a fifty-year dispute, therefore rests on two sets of photographs, one black and white from 1958 and one colour from 1983. No ink analysis, no paper analysis and no examination of the writing under magnification by a document examiner with the original in front of them has ever been carried out. This is not a case of scholars disagreeing about evidence; it is a case of the evidence being unavailable.

What Would Settle It Locating the leaves within the Patriarchate library and permitting a standard document examination: ink composition, comparison of the ink against other eighteenth-century writing in the same collection, paper and pen analysis, and assessment of the hand by a forensic document examiner. Any of those would bear directly on whether the writing is of the eighteenth century or the twentieth, which is the question the whole dispute turns on.

Expertise Needed Manuscript studies and Greek palaeography; forensic document examination and ink chemistry; and the cooperation of the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate of Jerusalem.

Question posed in Mark's Other Gospel: Rethinking Morton Smith's Controversial Discovery, Scott G. Brown.

Open Chen

Why It Is Open In the Classic inscriptions this month is written as a colour term joined to a second element read as sihoom. The colour term is secure. The second element is left untranslated, so the literal sense of the month name cannot be recovered from the inscriptions, and the storm gloss that circulates for it comes from the post-conquest Yucatec name instead.

What Would Settle It A collation of every spelling of the sign group across the Classic corpus, with its substitution sets and phonetic complements, set against the Colonial-period Yucatec and Cholan dictionaries, to test whether sihoom has a surviving lexical match.

Expertise Needed Maya epigraphy, with Mayan historical linguistics.

Question posed in The Maya (9th edition), Michael D. Coe and Stephen Houston.

Open Yax

Why It Is Open In the Classic inscriptions this month is written as a colour term joined to a second element read as sihoom. The colour term is secure. The second element is left untranslated, so the literal sense of the month name cannot be recovered from the inscriptions, and the storm gloss that circulates for it comes from the post-conquest Yucatec name instead.

What Would Settle It A collation of every spelling of the sign group across the Classic corpus, with its substitution sets and phonetic complements, set against the Colonial-period Yucatec and Cholan dictionaries, to test whether sihoom has a surviving lexical match.

Expertise Needed Maya epigraphy, with Mayan historical linguistics.

Question posed in The Maya (9th edition), Michael D. Coe and Stephen Houston.

Open Sak

Why It Is Open In the Classic inscriptions this month is written as a colour term joined to a second element read as sihoom. The colour term is secure. The second element is left untranslated, so the literal sense of the month name cannot be recovered from the inscriptions, and the storm gloss that circulates for it comes from the post-conquest Yucatec name instead.

What Would Settle It A collation of every spelling of the sign group across the Classic corpus, with its substitution sets and phonetic complements, set against the Colonial-period Yucatec and Cholan dictionaries, to test whether sihoom has a surviving lexical match.

Expertise Needed Maya epigraphy, with Mayan historical linguistics.

Question posed in The Maya (9th edition), Michael D. Coe and Stephen Houston.

Open Keh

Why It Is Open In the Classic inscriptions this month is written as a colour term joined to a second element read as sihoom. The colour term is secure. The second element is left untranslated, so the literal sense of the month name cannot be recovered from the inscriptions, and the storm gloss that circulates for it comes from the post-conquest Yucatec name instead.

What Would Settle It A collation of every spelling of the sign group across the Classic corpus, with its substitution sets and phonetic complements, set against the Colonial-period Yucatec and Cholan dictionaries, to test whether sihoom has a surviving lexical match.

Expertise Needed Maya epigraphy, with Mayan historical linguistics.

Question posed in The Maya (9th edition), Michael D. Coe and Stephen Houston.

Open Menog-i Khrad (Spirit of Wisdom)

Why It Is Open The text names no individual author or compiler and, like most surviving Pahlavi andarz literature, is transmitted as an anonymous product of the Zoroastrian priesthood. Its manuscript tradition post-dates its composition by centuries, leaving both authorship and a precise date unrecoverable from the text itself.

What Would Settle It An independent contemporary Sasanian or early Islamic-era reference naming the text or its compiler would settle this; absent that, a philological study placing its Pahlavi against securely dated Pahlavi texts could narrow the range.

Expertise Needed Iranian philology and Zoroastrian textual studies

Question posed in Pahlavi Texts, Part III: Dina-i Mainog-i Khirad (E.W. West), E.W. West, translator.

Open Beowulf

Why It Is Open The one manuscript is dated on palaeographic grounds to about 975 to 1025, and that date is not seriously contested. The date of composition is, and estimates have ranged across three centuries. Arguments from metre, from linguistic archaism, from the historical allusions and from the poem's Christian frame have each been made to carry the case and each has been answered. The atlas records the manuscript date as a date and the composition date as disputed, rather than choosing.

What Would Settle It A dating argument that does not depend on assumptions about the transmission it is trying to establish. Linguistic and metrical tests have been the most productive line, and a test whose result is independent of whether the poem was copied and modernised on its way to the surviving manuscript would settle far more than another reading of the historical allusions.

Expertise Needed Old English philology, historical linguistics and metrics, palaeography

Question posed in Klaeber's Beowulf and the Fight at Finnsburg, fourth edition, R. D. Fulk, Robert E. Bjork and John D. Niles (eds.).

Open Manasara

Why It Is Open Scholarly estimates for the date spread across the middle centuries of the first millennium CE, and the region of composition is not established either. The text is the most comprehensive surviving shilpa shastra treatise, so the answer would anchor the dating of the tradition around it, and at present the atlas can only record the spread.

What Would Settle It A dated inscription or a dated building whose plan, proportions or terminology can be matched to the Manasara's prescriptions specifically rather than to the shared vocabulary of the shilpa shastras. A critical edition establishing the relationship between the recensions would narrow the region.

Expertise Needed Indology, Sanskrit textual criticism, temple archaeology and epigraphy

Question posed in Divinity Atlas Open Questions Register, First Edition.

Open Chitrasutra of the Vishnudharmottara Purana

Why It Is Open The date is commonly given as the fifth to seventh centuries and is not the difficulty. The region is: the Chitrasutra is the earliest surviving Indian treatise on painting, so where it was written bears directly on which surviving wall paintings its rules were written for or against, and the atlas records the region as not established rather than assigning one.

What Would Settle It A regional attribution argued from the text itself, from its language, its named places, its ritual assumptions or its relationship to a datable local recension, rather than inferred backward from whichever painting tradition a reader wishes to connect it to.

Expertise Needed Indology, Sanskrit textual criticism, history of Indian art

Question posed in Divinity Atlas Open Questions Register, First Edition.

Open Turkey

Why It Is Open Turkish national censuses do not ask about sectarian or Alevi religious identity, so no official count of the Alevi population exists. Published estimates commonly range from about 10 to 20 percent of the population, a spread wide enough to reflect the absence of a count rather than disagreement over one.

What Would Settle It A nationally representative census or independently conducted survey that specifically asks about Alevi self-identification, which the Turkish state census currently does not do.

Expertise Needed Demography, religious studies

Question posed in Religious Composition of the World, 2010-2020, Pew Research Center.

Open Syria

Why It Is Open The last widely cited figures, about 74 percent Sunni Muslim, 11 percent Alawite, 10 percent Christian, describe the pre-2011 population. A decade of civil war, mass displacement and emigration has since altered the population in ways no subsequent census or survey has measured, so the current composition is not known.

What Would Settle It A new nationally representative census or demographic survey conducted once conditions allow it, accounting for returnees, refugees and the dead.

Expertise Needed Demography

Question posed in Religious Composition of the World, 2010-2020, Pew Research Center.

Open Lebanon

Why It Is Open No official religious census has been taken in Lebanon since 1932, by policy, to avoid disturbing the sectarian power-sharing arrangement fixed at that count. Every percentage in circulation, including the estimate recorded here, is a modeled estimate rather than a count.

What Would Settle It An official national census that asks and records sectarian religious affiliation, which Lebanese governments have avoided for over ninety years for the same political reason the number stays unknown.

Expertise Needed Demography, political science

Question posed in Religious Composition of the World, 2010-2020, Pew Research Center.

Open Sri Dalada Maligawa

Why It Is Open The temple permits only devotional access. No independent scientific examination of the relic has ever been permitted, so authenticity rests on transmitted tradition alone.

What Would Settle It Non-destructive material analysis of the relic, such as micro-CT or isotopic testing, if the temple ever permitted an outside examination.

Expertise Needed Archaeometry, Buddhist studies

Question posed in Sri Dalada Maligawa (institutional record).

Open Perth Museum (Culture Perth and Kinross)

Why It Is Open No documentary or physical evidence has ever settled whether monks at Scone hid the genuine stone and gave Edward I a substitute in 1296. The question has never been resolved.

What Would Settle It Discovery of a contemporary thirteenth or fourteenth century record describing the 1296 removal in enough detail to confirm or rule out a substitution, or a comparative petrological study against any stone independently documented as being at Scone before 1296.

Expertise Needed Medieval history, geology

Question posed in Perth Museum (institutional record).

Open Greek Orthodox Patriarchate of Jerusalem

Why It Is Open The two and a half leaves carrying the letter ascribed to Clement of Alexandria were removed from their host volume in the patriarchate library, reportedly for separate conservation, and have not been publicly produced since. Searches reported in the 2000s did not locate them, and no statement of their whereabouts has been published by the library or by anyone else.

What Would Settle It A statement from the patriarchate library, or a catalogue entry recording the leaves as a separate item with a shelfmark, would settle whether they are still held. Producing them for ink and paper analysis would additionally settle the authenticity question that currently depends entirely on photographs.

Expertise Needed Manuscript librarianship and codicology, with analytical conservation science if the leaves are produced

Question posed in Mark's Other Gospel: Rethinking Morton Smith's Controversial Discovery, Scott G. Brown.

Open Gayatri Hymn

Why It Is Open The hymn's placement in the family books, the oldest stratum of the Rig Veda, is secure on internal linguistic grounds. The absolute date of that stratum is not: proposed dates range across the whole second millennium BCE, and no inscription, datable artefact or external synchronism fixes any point in that range.

What Would Settle It A securely dated inscription, artefact or archaeological correlate that can be tied to the language or content of the family books, comparable to the role the Mitanni treaty plays in dating other early Indo-Iranian material, would anchor the range.

Expertise Needed Vedic philology, Indo-Iranian archaeology

Question posed in The Rigveda: The Earliest Religious Poetry of India, Stephanie W. Jamison and Joel P. Brereton.

Open Axion Estin

Why It Is Open Athonite monastic tradition credits the text to a tenth century revelation to a monk at Karyes, but that account is devotional legend, not a documented event, and no independent manuscript or historical source establishes the hymns actual date or author.

What Would Settle It A dated manuscript witness to the text earlier than, or independent of, the Athonite legend, or a specialist study of Byzantine Marian hymnography that traces the hymns transmission history on textual rather than legendary grounds.

Expertise Needed Byzantine liturgical history; hymnography

Question posed in The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, 3rd revised edition, F. L. Cross and E. A. Livingstone (eds.).

Open Ginans

Why It Is Open Ginans are attributed to named pirs of the Satpanth mission, but the surviving Khojki manuscripts are considerably later than the men they name, the corpus went on growing after those men had died, and an attribution in this tradition asserts lineage and authority as well as composition. Scholars therefore treat the ascriptions as traditional rather than as established, without being able to say which texts are early.

What Would Settle It Systematic dating of the Khojki manuscript collections, and linguistic analysis of the corpus against securely dated South Asian texts of the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries, would let the earlier strata be separated from the later. The manuscripts were catalogued only in the twentieth century and much of that comparative work has not been done.

Expertise Needed Manuscript studies, South Asian historical linguistics and Ismaili studies

Question posed in Songs of Wisdom and Circles of Dance: Hymns of the Satpanth Ismaili Muslim Saint, Pir Shams, Tazim R. Kassam.

Open Cerberus

Why It Is Open A popular claimed Sanskrit cognate (sarvara, an epithet of one of Yama's dogs) has been judged phonetically problematic by the standard modern academic authority on Greek etymology, Robert Beekes, who classifies the name Kerberos as Pre-Greek instead, meaning no successful derivation from any known Indo-European root has been established.

What Would Settle It Either a securely attested Pre-Greek Aegean word the name can be shown to derive from, which would require new epigraphic or comparative evidence beyond what currently survives, or a phonologically sound Indo-European derivation succeeding where the Sanskrit-cognate proposal has failed.

Expertise Needed Historical and comparative Indo-European linguistics, Pre-Greek substrate studies

Question posed in Etymological Dictionary of Greek, Robert S. P. Beekes, with Lucien van Beek.