Divinity Atlas

Open Questions

Things this atlas does not know. Each entry is a question that specialists have posed and not settled, recorded with what would actually resolve it and which expertise the answer needs.

These are kept deliberately, rather than quietly omitted. An atlas that shows only what it is sure of implies a confidence it has not earned, and the gaps are often where the interesting work is. Several sit exactly where two fields fail to meet: identifying the hyssop of the Hebrew Bible needs a botanist and a philologist of Biblical Hebrew, and neither one settles it alone.

You can send evidence on some of these. A pilot is open on 55 questions in one field, Palaeography. Each says what would resolve it; send something that meets that bar, with a source anybody can check, and an editor will weigh it. Sending evidence does not guarantee the question will be resolved, and it does not have to be your field to read what is being asked. See what is open.

Grouped by the shape of the gap rather than its subject: what sort of thing is unresolved.

Filter By Specialty 99 fields

Showing 481 to 500 of 608 open questions, page 25 of 31.

origins 16

Where something came from, and whether its origin story holds up.

Azu Ⰰ Where do the Glagolitic letterforms come from?

Open Azu Ⰰ

Why It Is Open Three explanations are held in the literature and none has carried the field. One derives the letters from the Greek minuscule cursive of the ninth century. One looks to Semitic and Caucasian models, among them Hebrew and Samaritan, Coptic, Armenian and Georgian. One holds that Constantine composed the signs from a small set of Christian figures, the cross, the circle and the triangle, so that the alphabet would belong to no existing script and would carry a Christian sense in its shapes. This is a genuine disagreement rather than a gap: camps exist and each can be read. What none of them has is a witness close in date to the alphabet, since the earliest Glagolitic manuscripts are a century or more later than the mission and were produced in a different country.

What Would Settle It A securely dated ninth century Glagolitic witness, or the recovery of one from the under-text of a palimpsest by multispectral imaging, would give the shapes a form early enough to be compared against the proposed models rather than against their tenth and eleventh century descendants. Failing that, a systematic morphological comparison of the whole Glagolitic repertoire against dated Greek minuscule hands and against the Semitic and Caucasian scripts proposed, published with the negative results as well as the positive ones, would establish how much of the resemblance survives measurement.

Expertise Needed Slavic palaeography; Greek palaeography; comparative script studies; multispectral imaging of palimpsests

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

The Words of Institution Did the Anaphora of Addai and Mari ever contain an institution narrative that was later lost, or has it never had one?

Open The Words of Institution

Why It Is Open The received East Syriac text has no institution narrative, and the Holy See judged eucharists celebrated with it valid in 2001 on the ground that the words are present in the prayer in a dispersed form. Whether the narrative was omitted, was lost in transmission, or was never there is argued from the manuscript tradition and from the structure of the prayer, and this run could not establish which reading holds the field.

What Would Settle It A study of the earliest East Syriac manuscript witnesses and their variants, set against the structure of the related Syriac anaphoras, together with the responses published by liturgical scholars to the 2001 guidelines.

Expertise Needed Liturgical history; Syriac manuscript studies

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

Shagai Does the shared use of the sheep astragalus for divination in the steppe and in the Greek and Roman world reflect contact, or independent invention?

Open Shagai

Why It Is Open The correspondence is exact rather than approximate: the same bone, the same four landing faces, cast in the same small numbers, read for answers and played with for entertainment in both regions. It is also exactly what one would expect to arise independently anywhere sheep are kept, since the bone is nearly cubical, resists rolling and is produced free in quantity. The objects themselves cannot distinguish the two explanations.

What Would Settle It Comparative work at the level of the cultural layer rather than the object: which faces are assigned which values, what combinations are named, and how the reading is structured. Those choices are cultural and could carry a transmission signal that the anatomy cannot. Dated archaeological assemblages showing marked or modified bones along a plausible corridor would also bear on it.

Expertise Needed Comparative archaeology of divination, and Eurasian material culture studies

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

Khamsa Where does the five-fingered khamsa form come from, and is there any evidential chain to a pre-Islamic Punic hand?

Open Khamsa

Why It Is Open A derivation from a Punic hand of the goddess Tanit is repeated widely in popular and semi-scholarly writing about North African amulets, and no chain of evidence is offered for it. No competing positive account of the origin has been established either, so this is a gap rather than a disagreement between camps.

What Would Settle It A published series of hand-shaped protective objects with secure archaeological contexts spanning the Punic period, late antiquity and the medieval Maghreb, or a study demonstrating that no such series exists and that the form arises later and independently.

Expertise Needed Punic and Roman North African archaeology, together with the material culture history of the medieval Maghreb

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

Tislit Unzar, the Rain Bride How old is the Amazigh rain-bride procession, and does any pre-modern source describe it?

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.).

Khai ϧ Where does the Bohairic Coptic letter khai come from?

Open Khai ϧ

Why It Is Open Six of the seven Egyptian additions to the Coptic alphabet are taken from Demotic and their sources are not in dispute. Khai is the exception. It appears in Bohairic and not in Sahidic, which has thirty-one letters where Bohairic has thirty-two, and accounts of where its shape came from differ. This atlas states the letter, its dialect distribution and its sound, and does not state a derivation.

What Would Settle It Forms collected from dated Old Coptic and early Bohairic manuscripts and compared against the Demotic sign repertoire, with the dialect distribution of the letter mapped alongside. A published palaeographic study of that comparison would settle it or would establish that the evidence does not.

Expertise Needed Coptology and Egyptian palaeography

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

Sha Ш Did the Cyrillic letters for the sounds Greek lacked come from Glagolitic, from a Semitic script, or from neither?

Open Sha Ш

Why It Is Open Roughly a dozen Early Cyrillic letters have no Greek model. The majority reading derives them from Glagolitic, which is older and already fitted to Slavonic. A second reading compares sha, tsy and zhivete with Hebrew or Samaritan letters, an argument made since the nineteenth century. A third holds that shapes this simple cannot support either claim. No exemplar of either alphabet survives from the ninth century, when the choices were made, so every argument runs on shape comparison against later manuscripts.

What Would Settle It A dated exemplar of either alphabet from the period of composition, or a decisive argument from the internal structure of the two letter sets rather than from resemblance between individual shapes. Failing either, a rigorous statistical treatment of shape similarity that establishes what level of resemblance would count as evidence at all.

Expertise Needed Slavic palaeography, with Semitic epigraphy for the comparative claims

Question posed in Byzantine Missions Among the Slavs: SS. Constantine-Cyril and Methodius, Francis Dvornik.

Shta Щ Is shta a ligature built inside Cyrillic, or a Glagolitic sign redrawn?

Open Shta Щ

Why It Is Open The letter is plainly built on sha. Whether the element below it is the letter tverdo, making the letter a Cyrillic ligature, or whether the whole sign was taken from the Glagolitic letter for the same cluster and redrawn to match sha, is argued. Both accounts are current and the shape is compatible with either.

What Would Settle It A close comparison of the earliest attested forms of the letter across the recensions, looking for a period or region in which the two elements are still drawn separately, which would settle the ligature reading, or for early forms too remote from sha and tverdo to be a ligature at all.

Expertise Needed Slavic palaeography

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

correspondence-testing 13

Recorded as unresolved.

Birch (Beth) Do Robert Graves's specific letter-to-month tree pairings in the 13-sign Celtic tree calendar correspond to anything beyond his own argument in The White Goddess?

Open Birch (Beth)

Why It Is Open Graves built the thirteen sign sequence in The White Goddess, 1948, by pairing his own reading of the Beth-Luis-Nion tree names to a thirteen month lunar calendar he reconstructed himself. That the wider tree calendar is his modern invention rather than an attested ancient system is not in dispute, and the tree names match because he took them from Ogham. What nobody has examined is the step after that: whether placing a given tree at a given calendar position reflects anything in the surviving Ogham material, or only his argument. No Celtic studies scholar has tested his month by month assignments either way, which is why this is an unfilled gap rather than a disagreement between camps. One question covers all thirteen signs, because the pairing is one act rather than thirteen.

What Would Settle It A philological comparison of Graves's month-by-month tree assignments against the Ogham letter-name glosses preserved in the Auraicept na nEces and the Briatharogam tracts, by a scholar of medieval Irish, to establish whether any assignment beyond the shared name is supportable.