Open Questions

Open The Valerian Persecution of Christians (257 to 260 CE)

Why It Is Open The surviving record names individual clergy executions in detail, including Sixtus II, Lawrence and Cyprian, but the 258 edict's own rank-based penalty structure for laity, degradation and confiscation short of death for many, means no ancient or modern historian consulted has reconstructed an aggregate death total across the whole three years of enforcement.

What Would Settle It A systematic collation of the named martyrologies and surviving contemporary correspondence, including Cyprian's own letters, across the persecution's three years, of the kind that could establish a documented floor even without a claim to completeness for the wider laity the second edict also targeted.

Expertise Needed Roman imperial history; early Christian source criticism

Question posed in Persecution of Christians in the Roman Empire (Wikipedia).

Open Djervi Ⰼ

Why It Is Open Djervi, the twelfth Glagolitic letter, sits well before the point in the alphabet recitation where letter names turn opaque or Greek-derived (that boundary falls at Tvrido, the twenty-first letter). Its own description states its sound, its regional history and its descendant the Serbian djerv, but gives no Slavonic word or sense behind the name itself, and no source consulted states whether this is a settled absence or simply unresearched.

What Would Settle It A study of the earliest Glagolitic abecedaria and of the South Slavic manuscript tradition that preserves djervi, checked against comparative Slavic dialect vocabulary for a word matching the form, beyond what the general reference literature already surveys.

Expertise Needed Slavic historical linguistics; Old Church Slavonic philology

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

Open Fritu Ⱇ

Why It Is Open The first twenty letter names of Glagolitic are ordinary Slavonic words and read together as connected sentences, from azu buky vede, I know letters, through ritsi slovo tvrido, say the word firmly. From fritu onwards the names stop meaning anything recoverable, and the reference literature records them as of uncertain or unknown origin without offering a reading. This is an absence rather than a disagreement: no camps hold rival etymologies for these names, and no investigation has settled whether they are corrupted Slavonic words, reflexes of Greek letter names, or labels that never carried a sense. The same gap stands over the corresponding Cyrillic names, which are the same names.

What Would Settle It A systematic etymological study of the full set of Slavic letter names, working from the earliest abecedaria and from the acrostic alphabet poems of the Old Church Slavonic tradition, which arrange the names in verse and may preserve senses the plain lists do not. A demonstration that the names never carried a sense would close the question as firmly as a set of etymologies would.

Expertise Needed Slavic historical linguistics; Old Church Slavonic philology

Question posed in The World's Writing Systems, Peter T. Daniels and William Bright (eds.).

Open Fert Ф

Why It Is Open The first twenty letter names of both Slavic alphabets are ordinary Slavonic words and read together as connected sentences, from azu buky vedi, I know letters, through rtsy slovo tverdo, say the word firmly. After that point the names stop meaning anything recoverable. The reference literature records them as of uncertain or unknown origin and offers no reading. This is not a disagreement between scholars with rival etymologies; it is an absence. Nobody has established whether these names are corrupted Slavonic words, reflexes of Greek letter names, or labels that never meant anything at all, and the question has not been taken up.

What Would Settle It A systematic etymological study of the full set of Slavic letter names, working from the earliest abecedaria and from the acrostic alphabet poems of the Old Church Slavonic tradition, which arrange the names in verse and may preserve senses that the plain lists do not. A finding that the names are demonstrably meaningless would settle the question as firmly as a set of etymologies would.

Expertise Needed Slavic historical linguistics; Old Church Slavonic philology

Question posed in The World's Writing Systems, Peter T. Daniels and William Bright (eds.).

Open Meenakshi Amman Temple

Why It Is Open Tamil Nadu's HR&CE Department administers the Meenakshi Amman Temple's finances but has not been found to publish a standing per-temple annual account for it; the state's own Comptroller and Auditor General reported in December 2024 that the department withheld the documents needed to verify temple revenue, and a Madras High Court order in September 2025 had to compel the department to produce the temple's own revenue and property details, which were not already public.

What Would Settle It A published per-temple annual account from Tamil Nadu's HR&CE Department for the Meenakshi Amman Temple specifically, or the department's compliance with the Madras High Court's September 2025 disclosure order once it is filed and made public.

Expertise Needed Tamil Nadu temple administration and public finance, and legal or investigative journalism covering HR&CE governance.

Question posed in Madras High Court Seeks Full Details of Meenakshi Temple Properties, Revenue and Encroachments (LawBeat, 2025), Salil Tiwari.

Open Ranganathaswamy Temple, Srirangam

Why It Is Open Tamil Nadu's HR&CE Department administers the Ranganathaswamy Temple at Srirangam's finances but has not been found to publish a standing per-temple annual account for it, and the state's own Comptroller and Auditor General reported in December 2024 that the department withheld the documents needed to verify temple revenue across its properties generally.

What Would Settle It A published per-temple annual account from Tamil Nadu's HR&CE Department for the Ranganathaswamy Temple specifically, naming its own audited revenue apart from the department's consolidated figures.

Expertise Needed Tamil Nadu temple administration and public finance, and legal or investigative journalism covering HR&CE governance.

Question posed in Tamil Nadu: CAG Slams HR&CE Department for Non-Cooperation in Temple Assets Audit (Organiser, 2024), TS Venkatesan.

Open Brihadishvara Temple

Why It Is Open Tamil Nadu's HR&CE Department administers the Brihadishvara Temple's finances but has not been found to publish a standing per-temple annual account for it, and the state's own Comptroller and Auditor General reported in December 2024 that the department withheld the documents needed to verify temple revenue across its properties generally.

What Would Settle It A published per-temple annual account from Tamil Nadu's HR&CE Department for the Brihadishvara Temple specifically, naming its own audited revenue apart from the department's consolidated figures.

Expertise Needed Tamil Nadu temple administration and public finance, and legal or investigative journalism covering HR&CE governance.

Question posed in Tamil Nadu: CAG Slams HR&CE Department for Non-Cooperation in Temple Assets Audit (Organiser, 2024), TS Venkatesan.

Open Sage

Why It Is Open Sage's ceremonial use among Indigenous peoples of western North America is a living tradition, and no specific, dated, non-intrusive documentary or archaeological source establishing its earliest attested use has been located.

What Would Settle It An archaeobotanical study identifying Salvia residue from a securely dated site, or a documented early written account naming the practice without describing closed ceremonial content.

Expertise Needed Archaeobotany, ethnohistory

Question posed in Encyclopedia of Religion, Mircea Eliade (ed.); Lindsay Jones (ed., 2nd ed.).

Open Sweetgrass

Why It Is Open Sweetgrass's ceremonial use is a living Indigenous North American tradition, and no specific, dated, non-intrusive documentary or archaeological source establishing its earliest attested use has been located.

What Would Settle It An archaeobotanical study identifying Hierochloe residue from a securely dated site, or a documented early written account naming the practice without describing closed ceremonial content.

Expertise Needed Archaeobotany, ethnohistory

Question posed in Encyclopedia of Religion, Mircea Eliade (ed.); Lindsay Jones (ed., 2nd ed.).

Open Lavender

Why It Is Open Lavender's Latin name derives from washing, its best documented ancient use, and no specific dated source for lavender burned as incense, as opposed to used in bathing, has been confirmed.

What Would Settle It A study of ancient or medieval texts distinguishing lavender's earliest attestation as a burned aromatic from its far better documented use in bathing and laundry.

Expertise Needed Classical history, history of perfumery

Question posed in Encyclopedia of Religion, Mircea Eliade (ed.); Lindsay Jones (ed., 2nd ed.).

Open Rose

Why It Is Open Rose's documented ancient uses are overwhelmingly as a garland, perfume or, later, a distilled water, and no specific dated source for rose burned as incense specifically has been confirmed.

What Would Settle It A study of ancient or medieval aromatic use texts distinguishing rose's earliest attestation as a burned incense from its far better documented uses as a garland and distilled perfume.

Expertise Needed Classical history, history of perfumery

Question posed in Encyclopedia of Religion, Mircea Eliade (ed.); Lindsay Jones (ed., 2nd ed.).

Open Third Fitna

Why It Is Open The Third Fitna combined provincial uprisings across the Umayyad caliphate with the Abbasid Revolution that ultimately overthrew it, fought in different regions at different times with a final purge of the Umayyad family at its close, and the scholarship follows that sequence of events narratively rather than tallying deaths across it.

What Would Settle It A historian's combined accounting of the war's provincial battles and the Abbasid purge of the Umayyad family that followed, or a source critical study of the surviving casualty claims.

Expertise Needed Early Islamic history, Abbasid history.

Question posed in The Prophet and the Age of the Caliphates: The Islamic Near East from the Sixth to the Eleventh Century, Hugh Kennedy.

Open Fourth Fitna

Why It Is Open The Fourth Fitna's central event, the prolonged siege of Baghdad during the civil war between the brothers al-Amin and al-Ma'mun, is described in narrative detail by the historians who study it, but none converts that description into a casualty estimate for the siege, and the war's fighting beyond Baghdad is even less quantified.

What Would Settle It A military historian's estimate of deaths during the siege of Baghdad combined with an accounting of the civil war's fighting in the wider caliphate.

Expertise Needed Early Islamic history, Abbasid history.

Question posed in The Prophet and the Age of the Caliphates: The Islamic Near East from the Sixth to the Eleventh Century, Hugh Kennedy.

Open Ridda Wars

Why It Is Open Early Islamic chronicles report specific casualty figures for battles such as Yamama, but modern historians of the early Islamic conquests regard those numbers as products of a later, formulaic chronicle tradition rather than contemporary counts, so no synthesis treats them as a reliable basis for a total.

What Would Settle It A source critical study weighing which, if any, of the early chronicle casualty figures for the Ridda Wars can be treated as historically reliable, or an archaeological approach to Arabian population loss in the period.

Expertise Needed Early Islamic history, source criticism.

Question posed in The Great Arab Conquests: How the Spread of Islam Changed the World We Live In, Hugh Kennedy.

Open Second Fitna

Why It Is Open The Second Fitna was fought across several separate fronts at once, the killing of Husayn at Karbala, the siege of Mecca, and provincial fighting over the caliphate itself, and the scholarship studies each front on its own terms, Karbala above all, rather than combining them into one casualty figure for the war.

What Would Settle It A historian's accounting combining losses at Karbala, the siege of Mecca and the war's provincial fighting into a single total, or a source critical study of the surviving casualty figures for each front.

Expertise Needed Early Islamic history, source criticism.

Question posed in The Prophet and the Age of the Caliphates: The Islamic Near East from the Sixth to the Eleventh Century, Hugh Kennedy.

Open Enochian Calls

Why It Is Open Secondary sources agree the sixteen calls between the two general openers and the Aethyr call work the four Elemental Watchtowers (earth, water, air, fire), but they disagree on the exact call-by-call assignment, and some later schemes (Golden Dawn) elaborate a finer subdivision (24 sub-angles) that is a 19th century systematization rather than Dee's own division. c2-esoterica declined to assign a specific element to any of the sixteen individual calls on 2026-07-27 rather than pick one scheme and present it as settled.

What Would Settle It A direct reading of the relevant Sloane manuscript folios (the calls proper, distinct from Sloane 3191's Heptarchia material) cross checked against Casaubon's 1659 print, or a specialist secondary source that states its own call-by-call table and its manuscript basis explicitly.

Expertise Needed Early modern manuscript studies / history of Renaissance magic

Question posed in A True and Faithful Relation of What Passed for Many Years Between Dr. John Dee and Some Spirits, John Dee, edited by Meric Casaubon.

Open De Heptarchia Mystica

Why It Is Open The 2026-07-26 discovery and buildout design documents estimated 49 HeptarchicRoyalty rows for this table. Peterson's edition of Sloane MS 3191 and the parallel full text edition on archive.org name only fourteen individuals: the seven Heptarchical Kings and their seven Princes, one pair per day of the week. Each Prince is also described with a retinue of forty two attendant ministers, but the manuscript identifies these by table position or letter rather than by proper name, so seeding them as Name rows would mean inventing names Dee never gave them. c2-esoterica seeded the fourteen verified Kings and Princes on 2026-07-27 and left this gap open rather than closing it with fabricated rows.

What Would Settle It A closer reading of the full Sloane 3191 folios, or a scholarly edition that resolves whether the forty two ministers per prince carry individual names anywhere in Dee's working papers, or whether the 49 estimate instead conflated the Heptarchia with a different Enochian roster (the ninety one Aethyr governors, or the Watchtower angels) that has its own separate naming scheme.

Expertise Needed Early modern manuscript studies / history of Renaissance magic

Question posed in De Heptarchia Mystica (Sloane MS 3191), Joseph H. Peterson's edition, John Dee, edited by Joseph H. Peterson.

Open Payt (Pha) ጰ

Why It Is Open Payt writes an ejective p, which has no Semitic ancestor. It is usually explained as a sign made by altering tayt, on the resemblance of the two forms and on the position of payt late in the order, but the explanation is an inference from shapes rather than a documented act, and it competes with an account deriving both Ge'ez p letters from Greek.

What Would Settle It A palaeographic sequence for both letters from dated Aksumite material, showing whether the earliest forms of payt resemble tayt more closely than the later ones do, would test the derivation directly.

Expertise Needed Ethiopian epigraphy and Semitic palaeography

Question posed in The World's Writing Systems, Peter T. Daniels and William Bright (eds.).

Open Psa (Pa) ፐ

Why It Is Open Psa writes a plain p, a sound Ge'ez did not inherit, because the Semitic p had become f in this branch. The letter therefore has to be an addition to an order that was already fixed, and two explanations circulate: that it is the Greek pi, borrowed with the Greek names and vocabulary that made a p letter necessary, and that it is a modification of an existing fidel sign. Both are readings of the letterform and of its position at the end of the order. Neither rests on a document.

What Would Settle It Dated Aksumite and post-Aksumite inscriptions and manuscripts showing the earliest forms of psa and payt, read against the Ancient South Arabian signary and against Greek letterforms in use in Aksum, would show whether the sign entered the script from outside or was built inside it.

Expertise Needed Ethiopian epigraphy and Semitic palaeography

Question posed in The World's Writing Systems, Peter T. Daniels and William Bright (eds.).

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.