Open Questions

Open Janja ϫ

Why It Is Open Both were taken from Demotic to write affricates that Greek could not, and both carry no numeral value, which is settled. Their phonetic values are not. Reconstructions differ between scholars and between the Coptic dialects, and the evidence is indirect, resting on transcriptions of Coptic words into other scripts and on comparison with earlier stages of Egyptian.

What Would Settle It A systematic collection of Coptic words transcribed into Greek and into Arabic, set against the dialect distribution of the two letters and against the Demotic signs they descend from. Camps exist on this question, so what would resolve it is evidence that discriminates between them rather than a further reading of the same material.

Expertise Needed Coptic phonology and Egyptian historical linguistics

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

Open The Quran

Why It Is Open Fourteen of the twenty-eight Arabic letters, exactly half the alphabet, appear disjoined at the opening of a number of suras. The classical commentary tradition records a wide range of proposals for what they do and returns no agreed answer, and one position long held within that tradition is that the meaning was not disclosed. Modern scholarship has added further proposals without producing a consensus either. This is not a case of two camps disagreeing; it is a case in which no reading has been established.

What Would Settle It Nothing in the manuscript record settles the meaning, and it may not be settleable. What would narrow it is evidence that bears on the openings as written objects rather than as a puzzle: systematic collation of the earliest codices for whether and how the letters are set off, and a distributional study relating the sets of letters to the suras that carry them.

Expertise Needed Quranic studies, Arabic philology and early Islamic manuscript palaeography

Question posed in The Study Quran: A New Translation and Commentary, Seyyed Hossein Nasr (editor-in-chief).

Open John Chrysostom

Why It Is Open The texts, their dating and their later use in antisemitic polemic are all documented and not in dispute. What is unsettled is what follows. Historians locate them in a local Antiochene quarrel and in the conventions of ancient invective; others hold that the framing does not answer for the use made of them. Churches that venerate him have acknowledged harm without any agreed consequence for the liturgical texts or the calendar.

What Would Settle It This is not resolvable by evidence. It would be settled, if at all, by a deliberate judgement of the churches concerned, taken publicly and with reasons, in the way other reception questions have been handled.

Expertise Needed Patristics; Jewish-Christian relations; ecclesiology

Question posed in Golden Mouth: The Story of John Chrysostom, Ascetic, Preacher, Bishop, J. N. D. Kelly, Chapters on the Antiochene preaching.

Open Senet

Why It Is Open No complete ancient rule text survives. Play is reconstructed from board layouts, marked squares and the partial instructions in late funerary compositions, and competing reconstructions disagree on movement and on how the marked squares functioned.

What Would Settle It A papyrus or ostracon setting out the rules of play in full, from a securely dated context, or a securely dated board with an inscribed sequence complete enough to fix movement independently of the later funerary texts.

Expertise Needed Egyptology; the archaeology of games

Question posed in In Search of the Meaning of Senet, in Archaeology 33, Peter A. Piccione.

Open Arbatel de Magia Veterum

Why It Is Open The 1575 Basel edition names no author, and no signed manuscript or contemporary attribution has surfaced. Modern critical editions have examined the question without reaching a settled candidate.

What Would Settle It A documentary link, a printer's record, a contemporary letter or an internal stylistic match tying the Latin text to a named figure in the Basel printing or physicians' circles of the 1570s.

Expertise Needed History of science / early modern book history

Question posed in Arbatel de Magia Veterum (Robert Turner's 1655 translation), Anonymous, first printed Basel 1575; English translation by Robert Turner, 1655.

Open Vedanga Jyotisha

Why It Is Open No independent record of Lagadha survives outside the text's own attribution. Nothing about his identity, period, or historical existence can be checked against any other source, which is a gap rather than a live scholarly disagreement: no camp holds a documented rival candidate.

What Would Settle It A securely dated independent reference to Lagadha in another Vedic-era or classical Indian text, or manuscript evidence tying a specific historical figure to the Vedanga Jyotisha's composition.

Expertise Needed Indology / history of Vedic literature

Question posed in The Vedanga Jyotisha of Lagadha, in its Rigveda and Yajurveda Recensions, Translated and critically edited by T. S. Kuppanna Sastry.

Open The Heptameron (Elementa Magica)

Why It Is Open The ascription to Pietro d'Abano is rejected on chronological grounds, which removes an author without supplying one. The text first appears in print in 1559 appended to the pseudo-Agrippan Fourth Book, and no manuscript witness earlier than the sixteenth century has been identified for it. Its angelic hours and weekday conjurations resemble material circulating in fifteenth-century ritual manuscripts, but resemblance is not descent.

What Would Settle It A dated manuscript of the text or of a recognisable portion of it from before 1559, or a securely dated source that the printed text can be shown to be copying. Collation of the Heptameron against the surviving fifteenth-century angel magic manuscripts, done systematically rather than by impression, would establish whether it is compiled from them.

Expertise Needed History of the book and early printing, Latin palaeography, and the study of late medieval ritual magic manuscripts

Question posed in Grimoires: A History of Magic Books, Owen Davies.

Open The Eight Garudhammas

Why It Is Open Several of the eight presuppose an order of nuns that already exists and has its own procedure, which they cannot have had at the moment of foundation. The sixth requires ordination from both communities, which is impossible for the first generation and is contradicted within the same collections. Six of the eight appear elsewhere in the discipline as ordinary rules, each with its own account of the incident that occasioned it. The Pali, Chinese and Tibetan recensions differ in wording and in order. Tradition places the rules at the founding of the bhikkhuni order during the Buddha's own ministry, but the Buddha's own dates are themselves unsettled and no source assigns the rules a specific year within it.

What Would Settle It Comparative work across all surviving recensions of the foundation account, including those preserved only in Chinese and Tibetan translation, with attention to which items are stable across lineages that separated early. Bhikkhu Analayo and Ute Husken have carried this a long way and the field has not converged. Independently, a firmer scholarly resolution of the Buddha's own chronology, or textual evidence dating the rules apart from the ordination narrative that carries them, would settle the date even where the recension question remains open.

Expertise Needed Buddhist studies; Pali, Chinese and Tibetan vinaya philology

Question posed in The Foundation History of the Nuns' Order, Bhikkhu Analayo.

Open Kaba'ir and Sagha'ir

Why It Is Open The manual is standardly cited under the name of Shams al-Din al-Dhahabi and is one of the most reproduced texts on the subject, but the attribution has been questioned, and this entry could not settle it from the sources available to it. The entry therefore describes the work without asserting authorship.

What Would Settle It A manuscript study of the earliest surviving copies and their transmission chains, compared against al-Dhahabi's securely attributed writings for method, vocabulary and the authorities he cites.

Expertise Needed Arabic manuscript studies; Islamic intellectual history

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

Open The Sampo

Why It Is Open The runes are not consistent about what the object is, and the Kalevala is a compilation that Elias Lonnrot arranged heavily, with the Sampo cycle among the parts he shaped most. Readings offered include a mill of plenty, the world pillar with the many-coloured lid as the sky vault, a coin die or treasury reflecting Byzantine trade contact, and a shamanic drum. None has been established and the singers may not have agreed either.

What Would Settle It Systematic analysis of the unedited rune collections in the Finnish Literature Society archive against Lonnrot's editorial drafts, to establish what the singers themselves said before the compilation; comparative work with Karelian, Ingrian and Sami material; and lexical study of the word sampo and its cognates.

Expertise Needed Finnish and Karelian folkloristics; historical linguistics; archival study of the Lonnrot papers

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

Open Skoptsy

Why It Is Open The sect produced no systematic theology. It left its teaching in hymns sung from memory and in the answers its members gave under interrogation, and almost everything recorded about that teaching passed through police, consistory and missionary hands. Those witnesses were prosecuting or refuting the sect and had every reason to record it at its most extreme, so the necessity claim may belong to the sect or to the men writing it down. The surviving hymn corpus has never been edited critically, and it has not been read against the depositions district by district and decade by decade.

What Would Settle It A critical edition of the Skoptsy hymn corpus and of the community manuscript books held in Russian archives, collated against the interrogation depositions from the same districts and dates, would show whether the necessity claim is the sect's own language or the language of the officials recording it.

Expertise Needed Slavic philology and the history of Russian religious dissent, with archival access to imperial police and consistory files

Question posed in Castration and the Heavenly Kingdom: A Russian Folktale, Laura Engelstein, The state's files on the sect and the problem of reading a doctrine out of them.

Open Martanda

Why It Is Open The line brings him back for birth and for death, and both readings fit. The solar reading is supported by later usage, where Martanda is an epithet of the sun. The mortal reading stays closer to what the hymn says. Neither has displaced the other and the hymn offers no gloss.

What Would Settle It A close comparison of how the commentarial traditions read the passage, set side by side rather than cited singly. No new evidence is expected; what is missing is the comparison itself.

Expertise Needed Vedic philology and the history of Sanskrit commentary

Question posed in Vedic Mythology, Arthur Anthony Macdonell.

Open Ahir Budhnya

Why It Is Open Budhna means bottom, base or root, and three readings are in use: the lower atmosphere, the floor of the sea, and the foundation of the world. The atmospheric reading rests on the company he keeps in the enumerations rather than on anything said about him, and the enumerations are formulaic.

What Would Settle It A Vedic or Brahmana passage that places him rather than merely lists him, or comparative evidence from Iranian material for a serpent of the deep whose location is specified.

Expertise Needed Vedic philology and comparative Indo-Iranian religion

Question posed in Vedic Mythology, Arthur Anthony Macdonell.

Open The Fatwa Against Salman Rushdie

Why It Is Open The Iranian government stated in September 1998 that it had no intention of threatening the author's life and would not encourage anyone to do so. It did not describe that as a revocation. Iranian clerical bodies and the foundation that offered a reward have held that a ruling of this kind cannot be withdrawn after the death of the jurist who issued it, and the reward has been publicly reaffirmed since. The two positions are held by different institutions in the same state and neither has been withdrawn.

What Would Settle It A published juristic analysis, from within the school concerned, of whether a ruling of this kind survives its issuer and what act would be required to end it. A clear statement from the authority claiming successor jurisdiction would settle the practical half.

Expertise Needed Islamic jurisprudence, Twelver Shia; contemporary Iranian legal and political history

Question posed in From Fatwa to Jihad: The Rushdie Affair and Its Legacy, Kenan Malik.

Open Shtreimel

Why It Is Open Three accounts circulate and none is documented: adoption of Polish or Russian noble dress; a decree said to have required Jews to wear an animal tail, for which no text has been produced; and the honouring of Shabbat with the best available in a cold climate. Jewish law neither requires nor mentions the garment, so there is no legal literature to trace it through, and it was written about only long after it was in use.

What Would Settle It Dated communal records, sumptuary or discriminatory legislation from the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth or the Russian Empire naming a fur headcovering for Jews, rabbinic responsa or communal takkanot referring to it, portraiture or inventories from the eighteenth century, and dress-history comparison with the szlachta kolpak.

Expertise Needed Jewish social history of eastern Europe; dress history; archival research in Polish, Russian, Hebrew and Yiddish sources

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

Open Archaeochemistry

Why It Is Open Chemical analysis of archaeological material goes back to the French chemist Marcelin Berthelot's survey of about 150 Egyptian and Near Eastern artifacts in the late nineteenth century, and continued through Earle Caley's American work from the late 1930s onward, but nobody appears to have fixed a single moment when the practice became a named field rather than a recurring collaboration between two older disciplines. Caley's own retrospective papers describe a history rather than announce a founding.

What Would Settle It A dedicated historiographic study of archaeological chemistry's own institutional history, comparable to the histories that exist for archaeometry (dated to the 1958 founding of the Oxford Research Laboratory for Archaeology and the History of Art) or radiocarbon dating (dated to Willard Libby's 1949 paper). No such study of archaeochemistry specifically has been identified; one would need to trace when practitioners first identified as archaeochemists rather than as chemists who occasionally worked on archaeological material.

Expertise Needed History of chemistry and history of archaeology, tracing when chemical analysis of archaeological material stopped being an occasional collaboration and became a named, self-identified subfield.

Question posed in The Early History of Chemistry in the Service of Archaeology (Caley, Journal of Chemical Education, 1967), Earle R. Caley.

Open Tibetan

Why It Is Open The script is plainly Brahmi-derived, but the candidates within that family are several and the letter forms have been argued both towards Gupta Brahmi transmitted through the Indian northwest and towards the scripts of Khotan and the Central Asian oasis towns. The traditional answer, a single minister trained in India, is first recorded four hundred years after the fact and cannot be tested against any imperial-period source.

What Would Settle It Dated inscriptions or manuscripts from the first century of Tibetan writing, compared letter by letter against securely dated Indic and Central Asian exemplars of the same decades. A palaeographic study of the earliest Tibetan hands against the Khotanese and northwest Indian corpora would narrow the model even if it never names a designer.

Expertise Needed Palaeography of the Brahmi-derived scripts, Old Tibetan philology, and Central Asian manuscript studies

Question posed in Tibet: A History, Sam van Schaik.

Open Tituba

Why It Is Open The 1692 court papers record her enslaved status and her testimony and nothing about her birth, her passage or her later life. Elaine Breslaw's reconstruction of an Arawak origin by way of Barbados works from indirect records and is explicitly circumstantial; other readings of the same material remain open, and the later life is a blank rather than a dispute.

What Would Settle It Documentary evidence tying her to a named vessel, cargo manifest, inventory, parish register or estate record, in Barbados, Massachusetts or elsewhere. A subsequent record of her under any name after 1693 would answer the second half.

Expertise Needed Colonial American and Caribbean archival history; the history of slavery and of Atlantic shipping records

Question posed in Tituba, Reluctant Witch of Salem: Devilish Indians and Puritan Fantasies, Elaine G. Breslaw, Breslaw, Tituba, Reluctant Witch of Salem.

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 Alaf ࠀ

Why It Is Open The continuity between Paleo-Hebrew and the Samaritan script is not in doubt, but the intervening centuries are thinly attested, so the stages by which the monumental Iron Age forms became the manuscript hand the community writes today are known only in outline.

What Would Settle It Dated Samaritan inscriptions or manuscript fragments from the intervening period, of the kind the Mount Gerizim excavations produced for the earlier end of the sequence.

Expertise Needed Northwest Semitic palaeography; archaeology of Samaria

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