Open Questions

Open Noakhali Riots

Why It Is Open Contemporary local police and administrative records for Noakhali and Tippera were extensively lost or destroyed in the displacement and administrative change that followed, so reported figures rest on later witness testimony and compilation rather than a contemporaneous count, and estimates in the secondary literature range from a few hundred to several thousand with no reconciled total.

What Would Settle It A study systematically cross-checking surviving colonial police, relief camp and missionary records against local Hindu and Muslim community testimony collected in the years immediately after the riots, of the kind that has been done for the Great Calcutta Killings but not yet completed for Noakhali specifically.

Expertise Needed South Asian colonial history; Bengal regional history

Question posed in Communal Riots in Bengal, 1905 to 1947, Suranjan Das.

Open Moplah (Malabar) Rebellion

Why It Is Open The only systematically compiled figure is the British government's count of rebels killed in action or executed, drawn from military and administrative reports; no historian has reconciled it with civilian and communal violence deaths, on both the Mappila and Hindu sides, across the affected taluks, or with the disputed higher figures in Mappila oral tradition.

What Would Settle It A study working systematically from surviving colonial revenue, police and court records for the Ernad and Walluvanad taluks, cross-checked against local Mappila and Hindu community records where they survive, to build a reconciled casualty estimate covering combat deaths, communal killings on both sides and deaths in custody across the whole rebellion.

Expertise Needed South Asian colonial history; Kerala regional and agrarian history

Question posed in The Moplah Rebellion and Its Genesis, Conrad Wood.

Open Moinuddin Chishti

Why It Is Open The narrative in circulation comes from Chishti biographical collections compiled in the fourteenth century and later, and from malfuzat attributed to the early masters, several of which specialists regard as fifteenth century compositions back-dated to their subjects. The birth date and birthplace, the itinerary and the account of his arrival in India all rest on that later material.

What Would Settle It Identification of documents contemporary with him, whether Persian administrative records, waqf deeds for the Ajmer site, or attestations in works datable to the thirteenth century, examined independently of the order's own literature.

Expertise Needed South Asian history; Persian manuscript studies

Question posed in Sufi Martyrs of Love: The Chishti Order in South Asia and Beyond, Carl W. Ernst and Bruce B. Lawrence, Chapters on the early Chishti sources.

Open Panchaloha

Why It Is Open The five-metal alloy is prescribed in the Shilpa Shastra textual tradition, but secondary accounts date the relevant texts anywhere from the fifth to the ninth century CE depending on the recension, with no single scholarly source consulted confident enough to cite for a precise date. The Chola dynasty, ninth to thirteenth century CE, is where panchaloha temple bronze casting is best documented and most celebrated, but that is its flowering rather than its documented beginning.

What Would Settle It A South Indian art history or Sanskrit textual scholarship source establishing when the specific Shilpa Shastra passages prescribing the five-metal alloy were composed, distinguishing that from the later Chola-era flowering of the practice.

Expertise Needed South Indian art history and Sanskrit textual scholarship

Question posed in Encyclopedia of Hinduism, Denise Cush, Catherine Robinson and Michael York (eds.).

Open Statue of Gommateshwara Bahubali

Why It Is Open No inscription at Shravanabelagola records the name of the sculptor or workshop that carved the image, even though the patron, Chavundaraya, is well attested. Digambara colossal images of this scale from the tenth century rarely name their carvers at all, so the silence is consistent with the period's own convention rather than a loss of a record that once existed.

What Would Settle It A donative or masons' inscription naming a sculptor or guild, of a kind found at other Hoysala and Ganga-period sites but not yet identified at Shravanabelagola itself, or a documentary source from the Ganga court not yet examined.

Expertise Needed South Indian art history, Ganga-period epigraphy

Question posed in The Jains, Paul Dundas, Gommateshwara / Bahubali colossus at Shravanabelagola, attribution gap.

Open Padri War

Why It Is Open Surviving casualty figures cover only individual sieges and engagements within the Dutch military campaigns after 1821, and no historian has reconciled these into a total for the whole thirty four year conflict, nor extended any estimate back to cover the internal Minangkabau religious civil war of 1803 to 1821, for which Dutch records do not exist.

What Would Settle It A study working from surviving Dutch colonial military and administrative archives for the 1821 to 1837 campaigns, cross-checked against Minangkabau oral and written tradition for the earlier internal conflict, to build a reconciled casualty estimate across both phases of the war.

Expertise Needed Southeast Asian colonial history; Dutch East Indies archives and Minangkabau oral tradition

Question posed in Islamic Revivalism in a Changing Peasant Economy: Central Sumatra, 1784-1847, Christine Dobbin.

Open Poso Conflict

Why It Is Open Official registers were incomplete for a conflict fought partly in remote villages across a large rural regency over three separate episodes; Human Rights Watch's field investigation and van Klinken's comparative study both work from local reporting and testimony rather than from a single comprehensive census, and their figures have not been formally reconciled against each other or against each community's own, generally higher, local counts.

What Would Settle It A study working systematically from Poso Regency hospital, police and village-level records surviving from 1998 to 2001, cross-checked against Muslim and Christian community-held counts, to build one reconciled casualty estimate across all three episodes of the conflict.

Expertise Needed Southeast Asian history; Indonesian regional studies

Question posed in Communal Violence and Democratization in Indonesia: Small Town Wars, Gerry van Klinken.

Open Martín Ocelotl

Why It Is Open The trial file ends at the sentence of confiscation and perpetual exile. No arrival record, prison register or burial entry in Spain has been shown to name him, and no later Mexican document mentions him. The story that the ship carrying him was lost at sea circulates in secondary accounts without a document behind it. Nobody has taken a position on his fate, because there is nothing to take a position on.

What Would Settle It A search of the Casa de la Contratación records in Seville for the sailing that carried him, and of the registers of the religious houses and prisons to which exiled offenders of the period were sent. The relevant Seville material is catalogued and has not been searched for this purpose.

Expertise Needed Spanish colonial archival history; Nahuatl palaeography

Question posed in Zumárraga and the Mexican Inquisition, 1536-1543, Richard E. Greenleaf.

Open The Alhambra Decree

Why It Is Open The decree of 31 March 1492 ordered a permanent exclusion, and no repealing act is catalogued in this atlas. That a formal revocation took place in the twentieth century is very widely repeated in general accounts, and none of them that the atlas has been able to check cites the repealing instrument. Spain has acted concretely to reverse the decree's effects, most recently through Ley 12/2015, which offered Spanish nationality to Sephardim of Spanish origin and frames itself in its preamble as a redress of the expulsion, but that law does not purport to repeal the decree and does not refer to any earlier act that did.

What Would Settle It A citation to the Boletin Oficial del Estado, or to a scholarly account working from it, identifying the repealing instrument, its date and its scope. A negative finding would be equally useful: if the decree was left standing and simply became inoperative, that is a fact about how spent instruments die and belongs in the record.

Expertise Needed Spanish legal history; Sephardic studies; archival research in the Boletin Oficial del Estado

Question posed in Ley 12/2015, de 24 de junio, en materia de concesion de la nacionalidad espanola a los sefardies originarios de Espana, Cortes Generales de Espana.

Open The Global Consciousness Project

Why It Is Open The network and its archive are not in dispute, but three analytic decisions are made by people with access to the data: which events count as globally attended, where each analysis window begins and ends, and which statistic to compute. The central criticism is that this freedom is sufficient to generate the reported result from structureless data, and it cannot be tested from the published analyses alone.

What Would Settle It An outside party defining a list of events and window boundaries in advance, lodging it, and the project running the analysis once against that list without modification.

Expertise Needed Statistics; pre-registration methodology

Question posed in The Global Consciousness Project, Roger D. Nelson (Global Consciousness Project).

Open Apparitions and Crisis Apparitions

Why It Is Open The 1889-1894 Census of Hallucinations argued that apparitions coinciding with a real death occurred more often than chance, but the finding rests entirely on retrospective self report gathered by volunteers approaching people they knew, against a chance baseline its own authors had to construct. No prospective, controlled test of crisis apparitions has been conducted since.

What Would Settle It A prospectively registered study defining in advance what counts as a qualifying apparition and a chance baseline independent of the reporting population, run forward in time rather than reconstructed from memory.

Expertise Needed Statistics; survey methodology; history of psychical research

Question posed in Report on the Census of Hallucinations, Henry Sidgwick, Eleanor Sidgwick, Frederic W. H. Myers, Frank Podmore, Alice Johnson.

Open Mahdist War

Why It Is Open Sudan's population collapse during the Mahdist period is well attested, but it combines the war's own combat deaths, the Mahdist state's internal campaigns against rival Sudanese groups, the 1888 to 1892 famine, and the disease that followed it, and no modern historian has disaggregated a war caused figure from the rest.

What Would Settle It A modern demographic or historical study working through Sudanese provincial and Mahdist state records to separate combat and internal campaign deaths from the famine and disease mortality of the same years.

Expertise Needed Sudanese history; historical demography

Question posed in The Mahdist State in the Sudan, 1881-1898: A Study of Its Origins, Development and Overthrow, P. M. Holt.

Open Nehunya ben HaKanah

Why It Is Open The Mishnah preserves only two short sayings in Nehunya ben HaKanah's name and places him among the sages of the generation around the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE. No source records a death year, and the later medieval attribution to him of the Bahir and the Ana BeKoach prayer is treated by scholarship as pseudepigraphic, supplying no genuine biographical date.

What Would Settle It A datable document or independent notice fixing a year in Nehunya ben HaKanah's later life, distinct from the Mishnah's generational placement of his two recorded sayings.

Expertise Needed Talmudic chronology, history of the generation of the Temple's destruction

Question posed in Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, Gershom Scholem.

Open Bruriah

Why It Is Open Bruriah is dated to the second century CE only through her documented relationships, as daughter of Hananiah ben Teradion, martyred by Rome around 135 CE, and as wife of Rabbi Meir, whose teaching activity is placed across the middle decades of the century. No Talmudic passage naming her carries an independent birth or death date, and later medieval legend about her is treated by modern scholars as a later addition rather than earliest-record testimony.

What Would Settle It A datable document or independent notice naming Bruriah, distinct from the undated Talmudic anecdotes and from the death dates of her father and husband, which fix only the generation she belonged to.

Expertise Needed Talmudic chronology, history of the Mishnaic and early Tannaitic period

Question posed in Encyclopaedia Judaica, 2nd edition, Michael Berenbaum and Fred Skolnik (eds.).

Open Rabbi Pinchas ben Yair

Why It Is Open Rabbi Pinchas ben Yair is placed in the second century CE only by his standing as a Mishnaic-era tanna and as the son-in-law of Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai, whose own circle is conventionally dated to the middle of the century. No chronicle or inscription independent of the Mishnah's generational framework fixes an actual birth or death year.

What Would Settle It A datable document or independent notice fixing a year in Rabbi Pinchas ben Yair's life, distinct from the Mishnah's generational placement of his teaching.

Expertise Needed Talmudic chronology, history of the Mishnaic period

Question posed in The Mishnah: A New Translation, Jacob Neusner, trans..

Open Rabban Shimon ben Gamliel II

Why It Is Open Rabban Shimon ben Gamliel II is first attested as a youth at the fall of Betar in 135 CE and later as Nasi presiding at Usha from around 140 CE, but no source gives an actual birth or death year for him.

What Would Settle It A datable document or inscription fixing his birth year, and a record of his death independent of his son Judah HaNasi's own, later-attested succession.

Expertise Needed Talmudic chronology, history of the Sanhedrin and the Hillelite patriarchate

Question posed in Encyclopaedia Judaica, 2nd edition, Michael Berenbaum and Fred Skolnik (eds.).

Open Linji Yixuan

Why It Is Open Linji Yixuan's death in 866 is well documented in Chan biographical tradition, including the Linji lu compiled after his death, but the same tradition gives no birth year, and standard reference works represent his life as a bare range with the birth end left open.

What Would Settle It A dated biographical notice from Linji Yixuan's own lifetime or from Huangbo Xiyun's circle fixing his age or birth year, distinct from the undated account of his training and later teaching career.

Expertise Needed Tang dynasty Chan Buddhist history

Question posed in The Princeton Dictionary of Buddhism, Robert E. Buswell Jr. and Donald S. Lopez Jr..

Open The Huichang Persecution of Buddhism

Why It Is Open Ennin's eyewitness diary and official Tang records document the persecution's scale in detail, including the 260,500 monks and nuns returned to lay life, but neither they nor any later Chinese history drawing on them records a death toll.

What Would Settle It A documented count from Tang administrative or local records of deaths directly caused by the persecution, distinct from the well recorded laicization total, should one ever surface in the surviving archive.

Expertise Needed Tang dynasty history; Chinese Buddhist history

Question posed in Ennin's Diary: The Record of a Pilgrimage to China in Search of the Law, Ennin, translated and annotated by Edwin O. Reischauer.

Open An Lushan Rebellion

Why It Is Open The only widely repeated total, thirty six million, comes from subtracting one disputed Tang census count from another rather than from any direct accounting of the dead, and the compiler who popularized it later revised his own figure down by more than half using a different method on the same two numbers. Historians who have examined the underlying census data consider it unreliable for this purpose, but none consulted has published a replacement war death total of their own.

What Would Settle It A demographic historian's reconstruction of Tang population loss across 755 to 763 that accounts for wartime migration, tax registration collapse and regional variation rather than a single before and after census subtraction, similar to the kind of regional accounting that has been attempted for other long, poorly recorded wars on this atlas.

Expertise Needed Tang dynasty history; historical demography

Open Church of Scientology

Why It Is Open The closing agreement was not published by the agency and its reasoning has never been set out on the public record. Reporting in 1997 raised the question of how the reversal came about without settling it, and the agreement's own terms were reported rather than officially released.

What Would Settle It Release of the agency's internal deliberative record, or a completed freedom of information action producing the file behind the decision rather than the agreement alone.

Expertise Needed Tax law and administrative history

Question posed in Scientologists' Deal With IRS: $12.5 Million, The Seattle Times.