Divinity Atlas
The Unknown Is Not Only Ancient
Most reference works treat not knowing as something that only happens to the distant past, a shrug earned by centuries with too few surviving records. This atlas's own register of gaps does not agree. Sitting beside a king whose reign cannot be dated is a controversy from 1987, filmed, reported and investigated by police, that turns out to be exactly as unresolved.
A Century Apart, Equally Unknown
Gebre Meskel of Aksum reigned in the sixth century. Aksum left no king list, no annals and no dated document for that century, and the succession cannot be reconstructed from surviving coinage alone. This is not a case of historians disagreeing about a date range. It is a case of there being nothing to disagree about.
The Deorala sati of 1987 is the opposite kind of event in almost every way. It happened in the age of newspapers, television and a criminal court, and it made a young woman named Roop Kanwar a national controversy within days of her death on a funeral pyre. Whether she went to the pyre of her own will has never been settled. The accounts contradict each other completely, no prosecution reached a finding, and full documentation turned out not to guarantee an answer.
The List Keeps Growing
The same register holds gaps that have nothing to do with antiquity. Nobody has published the reasoning behind a 1993 decision by the United States tax authority to grant Scientology tax exempt status, only the terms of the settlement that followed it. What became of the two leaders of a Ugandan movement after several hundred of its members died in March 2000 is not established either; both were sought, neither was produced, and the remains recovered were never comprehensively examined. Lebanon, a functioning modern state, has taken no religious census since 1932, for fear of disturbing the power sharing arrangement the old numbers still support.
A map built only from missing centuries would be a comfortable one to read, ignorance receding steadily as scholarship catches up with an ever more distant past. This one keeps admitting gaps opened yesterday, which is a harder map to close and a more honest one to publish.