Divinity Atlas
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, 1 selected
Showing 1 of 608 questions, filtered to 1 specialty.
identification 1
Which thing an old name actually refers to.
Nazca
What language did the Nazca people themselves speak?
Open Nazca
Why It Is Open The Nazca (about 100 BCE to 800 CE) left no writing system, so no text records their own speech. The Quechua and Aymara families dominant on the Peruvian south coast today arrived through Inca imperial expansion in the fifteenth century and Spanish colonial administration afterward, six hundred years or more after Nazca civilization had already ended, so their modern presence cannot be read backward onto the Nazca population. Scholarship on Andean historical linguistics treats a Quechuan or Aymaran tie for the pre-Inca south coast cultures as speculative, resting on colonial-era impressions of multilingualism that may equally reflect internal variation within those two families elsewhere in the Andes.
What Would Settle It A securely dated Nazca-period inscription would settle it outright, but none has been found and the culture is understood to have had no writing system at all. Short of that, a documented layer of loanwords or toponyms in a later, attested language that can be traced specifically and exclusively to the pre-Inca Rio Grande de Nasca drainage, rather than to the wider post-Inca Quechua-speaking Andes, would be evidence a historical linguist could evaluate.
Expertise Needed Historical linguistics, archaeology
Question posed in
The Languages of the Andes, Willem F. H. Adelaar with Pieter C. Muysken.