Open Questions

Open Gayatri Mantra

Why It Is Open The Gayatri'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 Saffron

Why It Is Open Saffron's cultivation and harvest are widely reported as depicted in Bronze Age Aegean wall painting, but a specific, checkable excavation report or scholarly publication establishing the secure date of that evidence, and confirming what it actually depicts, has not been confirmed.

What Would Settle It Citation of the excavation report or scholarly publication dating the Bronze Age Aegean saffron harvest imagery and confirming its subject.

Expertise Needed Aegean archaeology

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

Open The Recorded Corpus of Hoodoo Conjure

Why It Is Open Hyatt recorded thousands of interviews in the Jim Crow South as a white clergyman paying Black practitioners to describe a practice that had been criminalised and ridiculed. The transcripts record what was said. They cannot record what was not said, what was simplified for a paying outsider, or what was offered in place of something withheld. Every quantitative claim drawn from the collection, about regional distribution, about the frequency of a given practice, about what conjure was for, inherits this and it is rarely stated.

What Would Settle It Comparison of Hyatt's material against independently gathered testimony from the same communities and period, including Hurston's, the Federal Writers' Project narratives, and community-held family records, looking systematically for what appears in one and not the other. Oral history with descendants of identified informants, where the identification can be made, would test it directly. The question is answerable in principle and has not been pursued at scale.

Expertise Needed African American folklore studies, oral history and the historiography of ethnographic fieldwork

Question posed in Black Magic: Religion and the African American Conjuring Tradition, Yvonne P. Chireau.

Open Church of God in Christ

Why It Is Open Two scanned editions of the Official Manual, the denomination's own binding text, were located and fetched directly and both render only as compressed image data, not readable text. Four other sources describing the denomination in detail were checked and none of them addresses tithing at all, so the only description of the Manual's own tithing language found so far is a secondhand, unverified reference.

What Would Settle It A text transcription or OCR of the Official Manual's own chapter on tithes and church finance, or a scholarly source that quotes the Manual's tithing language directly rather than describing it secondhand.

Expertise Needed African American religious history and Pentecostal denominational studies

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

Open Kimbanguist Church

Why It Is Open The scholarly literature the atlas holds on this church is Marie-Louise Martin's 1975 study and Bengt Sundkler's earlier comparative work on prophet movements, which argue opposite readings of the founder's status but both predate the church's later doctrinal development by decades. The atlas has no source of its own for what the church's leadership has taught since, so the debated relation it carries is written from the two twentieth century camps only.

What Would Settle It A current Kimbanguist catechetical or confessional document, or a recent peer-reviewed study of the church's twenty-first century teaching, either of which would let the debated relation be dated and scoped properly instead of resting on sources fifty years old.

Expertise Needed African church history; the study of African Initiated Churches; Congolese religious studies

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

Open Diloggun

Why It Is Open Lucumi houses transmit liturgy and divinatory material in handwritten notebooks copied between godparent and godchild. They were never intended for publication, they vary by lineage, and no census of them exists. The published record is therefore of unknown completeness against a body of text nobody has counted.

What Would Settle It A provenanced survey of surviving libretas in institutional and family holdings, undertaken with the consent of the houses concerned, establishing dates, lines of copying and the extent of overlap between them.

Expertise Needed Afro-Cuban religious studies; manuscript studies; archival ethnography

Question posed in Sixteen Cowries: Yoruba Divination from Africa to the New World, William Bascom.

Open Ezana of Aksum

Why It Is Open Aksum has left no king list, annals or dated document for the fourth century. The reign is placed in the middle of the century only by inference: the sequence in which his coin types appear, the order of his stone inscriptions, and the single external synchronism of the letter from Constantius II preserved in Athanasius, which itself carries no year. No birth or death date is recorded at all, and published reign estimates differ by more than a decade at either end.

What Would Settle It A dated Aksumite document naming the king, a securely dated external record synchronising his reign with a fixed event, or a scientifically dated archaeological deposit stratified against the coin sequence, for example radiocarbon dates from a closed context containing both his pre-Christian and Christian issues.

Expertise Needed Aksumite archaeology and numismatics; Ge'ez and Sabaean epigraphy; late Roman documentary history

Question posed in Ancient Churches of Ethiopia: Fourth-Fourteenth Centuries, David W. Phillipson.

Open Gebre Meskel

Why It Is Open The Aksumite state left no king list, no annals and no dated administrative document for the sixth century. Kaleb can be placed in the 520s only through external synchronisms with the Himyar campaign, and his successors are known chiefly from coin types whose relative order is clearer than their absolute dates. Ethiopian regnal traditions assign Gebre Meskel a long reign, but those traditions are hagiographic compilations of a much later period and give figures that cannot be checked against anything. No published estimate rests on evidence rather than on the same tradition restated.

What Would Settle It A dated Aksumite inscription or document naming him, an external synchronism placing his reign against a fixed event in Byzantine, Sasanian or south Arabian record, or a scientifically dated archaeological deposit stratified against his coin issues, for example radiocarbon or archaeomagnetic dates from a closed context containing coinage of the post-Kaleb sequence.

Expertise Needed Aksumite archaeology and numismatics; Geez and Sabaean epigraphy; Byzantine and south Arabian documentary history

Question posed in Ancient Churches of Ethiopia: Fourth-Fourteenth Centuries, David W. Phillipson.

Open Tislit Unzar, the Rain Bride

Why It Is Open The rite is known almost entirely from twentieth century ethnography. Anzar appears in Amazigh oral tradition, but no documentary record has been identified between antiquity and the modern recording, so claims that the procession is a pre-Islamic survival rest on nothing that can be checked, and no dated alternative account exists.

What Would Settle It An attestation of the procession, or of a recognisably related rite, in medieval or early modern Maghribi Arabic writing, in an Amazigh manuscript tradition, or in a travel account with a firm date.

Expertise Needed Amazigh philology and the ethnohistory of the Maghreb, with medieval Arabic textual scholarship

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

Open Wallace Fard Muhammad

Why It Is Open He is the founding figure of the Nation of Islam, a movement with millions of adherents across its history, and no document has been produced that establishes who he was before he appeared in Detroit around 1930. Historians, journalists and the FBI have each proposed different identities and origins for him, and none commands consensus.

What Would Settle It A birth, immigration, employment or court record naming him under a documented pre-1930 identity, corroborated independently of the competing candidate identities already proposed by investigators and journalists.

Expertise Needed American religious history; archival and genealogical research; journalism and investigative history

Question posed in The Nation of Islam: An American Millenarian Movement, Martha F. Lee.

Open Theban W W

Why It Is Open W is the awkward letter of the set. It was not a letter of the Latin alphabet the cipher was built on, and in the original chart it stands after Z rather than in alphabetical position, as a recent addition. Later copyists appear to have misread that presentation, and the printed sign for W differs between sources. Which of the circulating forms is faithful to the 1518 chart has never been established, so the atlas cannot say which sign for W it is showing.

What Would Settle It A collation of the surviving copies and early impressions of Polygraphiae against the Theban charts in Agrippa's De occulta philosophia and the later grimoire reprints, reading the 1518 sign for W from the earliest surviving impressions directly rather than from any redrawing, and tracing where the divergent forms enter the tradition.

Expertise Needed Analytical bibliography and description of early printed books, palaeography

Question posed in Theban alphabet (reference article), Wikipedia contributors, Sections on letters and on the original chart: in the original chart by Trithemius the letter W comes after Z, as it was a recent addition to the Latin alphabet..

Open Phrygian

Why It Is Open The pantheon holds Cybele and Attis and this atlas has no entry yet for Phrygian religion or for the Roman cult of Magna Mater that carried it westward. Several neighbouring ancient traditions already have their own entries, Hittite Religion, Etruscan Religion and Canaanite Religion among them, so the absence looks like a gap rather than a decision.

What Would Settle It An entry for Phrygian religion, or a decision that the cult belongs under an existing tradition such as Roman Religion, in which case the deities need reassigning rather than the pantheon relinking.

Expertise Needed Anatolian archaeology; Greco-Roman religion

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

Open Phrygian

Why It Is Open The Old Phrygian corpus is short and largely dedicatory, and the Greek and Roman writers who describe the cult of the Mother report its rites and the story of Attis without any account of origins. It is not that two readings compete; it is that the material has never yielded one, and the question has effectively been set down rather than argued over.

What Would Settle It A longer Old or New Phrygian text of narrative character, or a securely Phrygian iconographic sequence depicting origins, from the highland monuments or a sanctuary excavation.

Expertise Needed Anatolian epigraphy and Phrygian philology, with the archaeology of the Phrygian highlands

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

Open Dura-Europos Synagogue Frescoes

Why It Is Open The synagogue's dedicatory Aramaic inscription names the community elders and officials responsible for the 244 or 245 CE renovation, but no painter or workshop. Neither the founding excavation report nor later scholarship consulted for this entry identifies who executed the cycle.

What Would Settle It A signed or otherwise attributable inscription, a stylistic link to a documented workshop active elsewhere in Roman Syria, or comparative technical analysis of pigment and technique connecting the Dura Europos paintings to a named or identifiable school of painters.

Expertise Needed Ancient art history, Roman provincial archaeology

Question posed in Kraeling, "The Synagogue" (Dura-Europos Final Report VIII, Part I), 1956, Carl H. Kraeling.

Open The Greco-Persian Wars

Why It Is Open Herodotus's Histories records casualty figures for individual engagements, Marathon, Thermopylae, Salamis, Plataea and Mycale among them, but modern scholars regard many of the ancient figures, including the size of the Persian invasion force itself, as unreliable and often inflated. No modern scholarly synthesis was located that totals deaths across the wars' span into a single figure; scholarship instead discusses each battle's own contested numbers on its own terms.

What Would Settle It A modern scholarly total built from revised, rather than Herodotus's own, troop and casualty figures across the wars' major engagements, or a demographic study of Achaemenid and Greek population loss over the conflict. No such synthesis was located.

Expertise Needed Ancient Greek and Achaemenid Persian military history.

Question posed in Histories, Herodotus.

Open Chachapoya

Why It Is Open The Chachapoya left no deciphered writing system, and Spanish chroniclers who might have recorded their beliefs encountered them only after Inca conquest had already reshaped their political and religious institutions in the late fifteenth century. Their monumental architecture, sarcophagi and mummy bundles are extensively documented archaeologically, but the specific deities, cosmology and ritual meaning behind that material record are not confidently known from any surviving account.

What Would Settle It Further bioarchaeological and iconographic study of undisturbed Chachapoya funerary sites, such as the Laguna de los Condores mausoleums, that could recover painted or carved religious imagery predating Inca influence, together with any Chachapoya-specific vocabulary that might survive embedded in later colonial-era Quechua or Spanish records of the region.

Expertise Needed Andean archaeology and bioarchaeology

Question posed in Chachapoyas: Cultural Development at an Andean Cloud Forest Crossroads (Church and von Hagen), Warren B. Church and Adriana von Hagen.

Open Khipu

Why It Is Open That khipu record numbers in a decimal positional system is settled and readable. Beyond that the field divides. Gary Urton argues that the binary structural choices available in the medium, in colour, spin, ply and attachment, give it an information capacity well beyond accounting. Others hold the cords numerical, with any narrative held in the specialist's memory and the khipu serving as a mnemonic prompt. Colonial testimony describing khipu specialists reading out histories and confessional records is compatible with both, because a skilled performance from a numerical prompt looks identical to a reading.

What Would Settle It A matched pair: one khipu and an independent Spanish document recording the same content, aligned closely enough that the correspondence cannot be coincidence. A small number of candidate matches have been proposed and none is yet accepted as conclusive. Progress requires archival paleography alongside statistical analysis of the surviving corpus of roughly a thousand khipu.

Expertise Needed Andean archaeology, colonial paleography and quantitative analysis of the khipu corpus

Question posed in Signs of the Inka Khipu: Binary Coding in the Andean Knotted-String Records, Gary Urton.

Open Juan Chocne

Why It Is Open The records of Cristóbal de Albornoz carry the suppression of Taki Onqoy and the abjuration of its leaders, and then stop. No later document naming Chocne has been produced. He was not tried by the Inquisition, which did not hold jurisdiction over indigenous people, so the usual sentencing paperwork does not exist for him. The gap has never been the subject of a dedicated study, so this is an absence rather than a scholarly disagreement.

What Would Settle It A search of the Cuzco ecclesiastical and notarial archives, and of the Albornoz probanzas de méritos in Seville, for any later mention of the name. Parish registers of the reducciones in the Huamanga region for the 1570s would be the other place to look.

Expertise Needed Andean colonial archival history; Quechua palaeography

Question posed in The Incas, 2nd edition, Terence N. D'Altroy.

Open Catequil

Why It Is Open Catequil is recorded only through Spanish colonial chronicles transcribing Andean-language testimony into Spanish orthography, none of which explain what the name itself means. The deity's association with thunder and lightning is well established from his recorded role and myths, but no confirmed derivation for the name has been established.

What Would Settle It A philological study of the name against Quechua and other Andean languages attested in the region, or an earlier colonial-era source recording the word alongside a stated meaning, neither of which has been identified in the existing chronicle record.

Expertise Needed Andean historical linguistics, ethnohistory of the pre-Columbian Andes

Question posed in Catequil: The Archaeology, Ethnohistory, and Ethnography of a Major Provincial Huaca (Topic and Topic), John R. Topic and Theresa L. Topic.

Open Musaylima

Why It Is Open Every reported revelation of his survives only as quotation inside the writings of the tradition that defeated him, presented in order to be ridiculed, and no manuscript, inscription or non-Muslim notice offers a control. This is a gap rather than a dispute: no scholar holds a position on the content of his teaching, because there is nothing independent to hold a position about.

What Would Settle It A documentary or epigraphic find from al-Yamama independent of the Islamic historiographical tradition, or an early non-Muslim notice of the Hanifa movement of the 630s.

Expertise Needed Arabian epigraphy and early Islamic historiography

Question posed in The Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd edition, P. Bearman, Th. Bianquis, C. E. Bosworth, E. van Donzel and W. P. Heinrichs (eds.).