Open Questions

Open The Bahir (Book of Illumination)

Why It Is Open Scholem argued that the Bahir is an edited compilation rather than a single composition, and that some of its material is older than its Provencal setting and eastern in origin. He could not reconstruct what that material was or how it travelled, and neither has anyone since. The manuscript tradition begins after the book was already circulating in Languedoc, so there is no witness to the stage before editing.

What Would Settle It A manuscript or a citation predating the Provencal circulation, or a securely dated eastern text sharing the Bahir's distinctive images and its fragmentary form. Comparative work on the Gnostic and Merkavah parallels Scholem noted, done against dated witnesses rather than against reconstructions, would narrow it even without a new manuscript.

Expertise Needed Medieval Jewish intellectual history, Hebrew and Aramaic codicology, and the study of late antique Jewish esoteric literature

Question posed in Origins of the Kabbalah, Gershom Scholem, translated by Allan Arkush.

Open Mongolian A ᠠ

Why It Is Open The descent is agreed in outline and unavailable in detail here. Mongolian took its alphabet from Old Uyghur, Old Uyghur took its own from Sogdian, and Sogdian belongs to the family descended from the Aramaic abjad. Whether the Sogdian alphabet was taken from the Syriac hand or directly from Imperial Aramaic chancery writing is argued about, and neither Old Uyghur nor Sogdian is held in this atlas as an alphabet, so no per-letter descent can be asserted from a Mongolian letter to any letter the atlas does hold. The letters here therefore carry intra-alphabet relations only.

What Would Settle It Seeding Old Uyghur and Sogdian as alphabets in their own right, with their letters, so that the chain can be recorded one step at a time rather than jumped in a single relation. Alongside that, a letter by letter comparison of dated Sogdian, Old Uyghur and early Mongolian documents against Imperial Aramaic and Syriac letterforms, taken from published palaeographic work rather than inferred.

Expertise Needed Palaeography and Central Asian philology

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

Open Armenian Chant (Sharakan)

Why It Is Open Khaz signs were written above Armenian chant texts from about the ninth century and grew steadily more elaborate, but they did not fix pitch and appear to have cued gestures a singer already knew. When that oral knowledge lapsed the signs stopped being readable. Komitas Vardapet worked on the problem for years without reaching a reading, and Robert At'ayan's systematic study did not produce an agreed decipherment. There is no camp to argue against; the work simply stopped.

What Would Settle It A manuscript pairing khaz with a notation whose values are known, or a securely dated source setting Armenian signs beside Byzantine ones for the same melody, would give the system the external check it has never had. Comparative work on the earliest strata, before the signs multiplied, may also be able to fix a small core of them.

Expertise Needed Musicology and Armenian palaeography

Question posed in The Armenian Neume System of Notation, Robert At'ayan.

Open Georgian Chant

Why It Is Open Georgian hymn books of the tenth century carry chant signs, but nobody can say what they instruct. Comparison against Byzantine notation has not produced a reading and the Georgian signs do not map onto it cleanly. The consequence is severe for the tradition: no medieval Georgian melody can be recovered, and everything sung today descends from transcriptions made from living singers nine hundred years later. Nobody holds a rival decipherment; the question has simply been left where it was.

What Would Settle It A Georgian manuscript giving the same chant in both neumes and a notation of known values, or a bilingual source setting Georgian signs beside Byzantine ones, would supply the external control the system lacks. Systematic comparison of the neume repertory across the surviving tenth century books may also isolate a small core of signs whose behaviour is regular enough to test.

Expertise Needed Musicology and Georgian palaeography

Question posed in The Transcription and Transmission of Georgian Liturgical Chant, John A. Graham.

Open Maui

Why It Is Open The atlas held two Maui rows that disagreed. The retired Character 413 stated that most Polynesian traditions treat him as a being of exceptional power within the human line rather than as an atua receiving cult. Deity 205 carries relation 4695, worshipped in Polynesian Religion, written as attested. Article 26230 on the retired row said only that in some traditions he stands closer to a god than to a man, which is weaker than either. The question was never researched; the two rows were written separately and neither knew of the other.

What Would Settle It Evidence of cult practice directed at Maui specifically: named heiau or marae dedicated to him, karakia or pule addressed to him rather than merely reciting his deeds, or offerings made to him, reported island group by island group rather than for Polynesia as a whole. A negative finding stated by a scholar of Polynesian religion would settle it equally well.

Expertise Needed Polynesian religious studies; Pacific anthropology

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

Open The Vishvadevas

Why It Is Open The hymns addressed to the all-gods invoke Indra, Agni, Mitra and Varuna by name in the same breath, which is difficult on the totality reading and unremarkable on the class reading. The ritual tradition then gives the Vishvadevas a portion of their own in the domestic and ancestral rites, which favours a class, but ritual is capable of serving a formula a plate.

What Would Settle It A systematic account of what the hymns addressed to the Vishvadevas actually say about them, set against the hymns addressed to named collectives such as the Adityas and the Rudras, to establish whether the group has a describable collective character or only a name.

Expertise Needed Vedic philology and the study of Vedic ritual

Question posed in Vedic Mythology, Arthur Anthony Macdonell.

Open Basque

Why It Is Open Basque is the last pre-Indo-European language of western Europe and has no demonstrated relative. Proposals linking it to the Caucasian languages, to Iberian and to a wider Vasconic substrate have each been made and none has convinced. R. L. Trask, who assessed them, concluded that none of them meets the standard and that the honest answer is that we do not know, rather than that the relatives are contested. Aquitanian, the ancestor of Basque or its near relative, is attested only in Roman-era personal and divine names on inscriptions and reaches no further back.

What Would Settle It New epigraphic material in Aquitanian or in a neighbouring undeciphered language, long enough to show grammar rather than names alone, would give the comparative method something to work with. A decipherment of Iberian that showed grammatical morphology rather than a shared writing system would settle the Iberian question either way. Failing new text, the answer is likely to stay open, because the comparative method cannot reach the required depth on the evidence that survives.

Expertise Needed Historical linguistics, with palaeohispanic epigraphy

Question posed in The History of Basque, R. L. Trask.

Open Sumerian

Why It Is Open Sumerian is recorded in quantity from the late fourth millennium BCE and is the earliest written language anywhere, yet no genetic connection to another language or family has ever been demonstrated to the standard the comparative method requires. Proposals linking it to Dravidian, to Uralic, to the Caucasian families, to Sino-Tibetan and to Basque have each been published and none has been taken up. There is no camp to join and no argument in progress, which is what separates this from a contested classification: the absence is of an answer, not of agreement.

What Would Settle It A set of regular sound correspondences between Sumerian and another attested language or reconstructed proto-language, covering basic vocabulary and grammatical morphology rather than isolated look-alikes, and surviving the usual controls for borrowing and for chance resemblance. Failing that, a substantial text in a related language recovered from the same region and period would give the comparison something to work from. At present Sumerian's nearest neighbours in the record are Akkadian, which is Semitic and demonstrably unrelated, and Elamite, which is itself an isolate.

Expertise Needed Historical linguistics; Assyriology; comparative philology

Question posed in The Sumerian Language: An Introduction to Its History and Grammatical Structure, Marie-Louise Thomsen.

Open Geshtinanna

Why It Is Open Sumerian art rarely labels its figures, and reference studies of Mesopotamian iconography have not been able to isolate a scene or attribute as distinctively Geshtinanna's, unlike her brother Dumuzi or her rival Inanna, both identifiable from repeated attributes across many surviving objects.

What Would Settle It A securely inscribed or otherwise firmly identified image of Geshtinanna, distinguishing her from the generic Mesopotamian goddess type, turning up in excavation or in a museum collection reassessment of unattributed glyptic art.

Expertise Needed Assyriology, Mesopotamian art history and archaeology

Question posed in Gods, Demons and Symbols of Ancient Mesopotamia: An Illustrated Dictionary, Jeremy Black and Anthony Green.

Open Chernobog

Why It Is Open Chernobog is attested exactly once, by the twelfth-century German cleric Helmold of Bosau, who names the Black God only to say that Baltic Slavic tribes cursed him at their feasts for bringing misfortune. Helmold describes no idol, image, temple or cult object, and no earlier or independent later source, inscription or archaeological find corroborates or adds to his brief mention.

What Would Settle It An independent contemporary or near-contemporary textual witness describing a Chernobog cult image, or an archaeological find, such as the kind of carved Slavic cult idol recovered elsewhere on the Baltic coast, that can be identified with this god specifically rather than with the pantheon in general.

Expertise Needed Slavic archaeology, medieval Baltic and Wendish history, history of religion

Question posed in The Slavs (Gimbutas), Marija Gimbutas.

Open Ghmerti

Why It Is Open Ghmerti is the old Kartvelian word for the divine and remains the modern Georgian word for the Christian God, and the medieval chronicles that describe the pre-Christian Kartlian pantheon survive only in Christian-era compilation, written by authors already using the same word for the god of the new religion. Nothing in that filtered record describes an image, statue or symbol for a distinct pre-Christian figure under this name, and no archaeological find has been identified as one either.

What Would Settle It An archaeological find, a carved or cast object identifiable as a pre-Christian Kartlian sky or divinity figure, or a surviving pre-Christian textual witness independent of the later Christian chroniclers, either of which would show whether the word ever named a figure with a pictorial or sculptural tradition of its own.

Expertise Needed Kartvelian studies, Caucasian archaeology

Question posed in The Georgians (Lang), David Marshall Lang.

Open Jaguar

Why It Is Open The were-jaguar infant is one of the most frequent and unmistakable figures in Olmec sculpture, appearing across major sites from San Lorenzo to La Venta. The Olmec left no deciphered textual record explaining their iconography, so nothing establishes whether the figure depicts a mythic birth, a were-jaguar transformation, a ruler's supernatural parentage or something else. Proposed readings are informed guesses drawn from later Mesoamerican parallels rather than conclusions drawn from Olmec sources themselves.

What Would Settle It Decipherment of a securely dated Olmec or Epi-Olmec inscription that names or glosses the figure, or a controlled excavation context, an offering, a burial or a workshop, that ties a were-jaguar sculpture to an identifiable ritual practice.

Expertise Needed Mesoamerican archaeology, epigraphy

Question posed in Encyclopedia of Religion, Mircea Eliade (ed.); Lindsay Jones (ed., 2nd ed.).

Open Ranjana

Why It Is Open Ranjana is unencoded, so there is no character standard to settle the inventory. The one openly licensed Ranjana typeface, Nithya Ranjana, ships two builds: the Devanagari-mapped build has no way to reach these six, because Devanagari has no letters for them, while the Newa-mapped build carries a separate outline for each, since the Newa block encodes them as letters of Prachalit. The font therefore draws six shapes whose status in Ranjana's own tradition this run could not establish, so the 47 letters seeded here are the vowels and consonants both builds agree on.

What Would Settle It A reading of Newar alphabet charts and primers that teach Ranjana in the Kathmandu Valley, or of the Ranjana Unicode encoding proposals submitted to the Unicode Technical Committee, either of which would state whether the six are counted as letters. If they are, they belong in the block at ids 5247 to 5252.

Expertise Needed Newar palaeography; South Asian script encoding

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

Open The Vasus

Why It Is Open The class has a fixed size and an unfixed roll. The surviving lists agree that the eight cover the elements and the abodes and differ on which names fill the slots and in what order. No version has the standing to correct the others, and the Mahabharata story fixed the membership in practice without settling the textual question.

What Would Settle It A comparative collation of the lists across the Brahmana, epic and Puranic sources establishing whether one order is prior and the others derive from it, or whether the variation goes back as far as the class does.

Expertise Needed Sanskrit textual criticism

Question posed in Vedic Mythology, Arthur Anthony Macdonell.

Open Barquinha

Why It Is Open The tradition is the least documented of the three Brazilian ayahuasca religions. Santo Daime and the Uniao do Vegetal have been surveyed, counted and litigated over, and the Barquinha has not. Most of what exists is recent Brazilian scholarship, and the atlas has found no figure it is willing to publish for the number of houses or their distribution.

What Would Settle It A survey of the Acre houses and any outside the state, undertaken with the communities rather than from a distance, giving the lines of descent from the founding centre.

Expertise Needed Brazilian religious studies and the anthropology of Amazonian religion

Question posed in Ayahuasca, Ritual and Religion in Brazil, Beatriz Caiuby Labate and Edward MacRae (eds.).

Open The Great Year

Why It Is Open This pass seeded only the four tropical-sign ages with genuine independent literature discussing them individually (Taurus, Aries, Pisces and Aquarius), plus the Great Year concept row that frames the whole twelve-part cycle. Gemini, Cancer, Leo, Virgo, Libra, Scorpio, Sagittarius and Capricorn were left out rather than written thin from the same general astrological-history sources already cited for the other four.

What Would Settle It A literature review of each remaining sign's astrological-age material, checking whether it has been discussed with comparable depth and citable sourcing to Nicholas Campion's treatment of Taurus, Aries, Pisces and Aquarius in A History of Western Astrology, before writing per-age entries rather than a single thin placeholder for all eight.

Expertise Needed History of astrology / esoteric studies

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

Open Christus Victor

Why It Is Open Aulen argued that a unified dramatic view ran through the patristic period and through Luther, and was obscured by the scholastic and liberal accounts. Specialists in patristics have objected that victory language sits alongside sacrificial, medicinal and pedagogical language in the same writers, and that sorting the material into three types flattens the evidence. The theological position and the historical claim are frequently defended and attacked as though they were one thing.

What Would Settle It A survey of the atonement language in the principal patristic writers that counts and contexts each register separately rather than assigning each writer to a type. This would establish whether the dramatic language is dominant, co-ordinate, or one register among several.

Expertise Needed Patristics; historical theology

Question posed in Christus Victor: An Historical Study of the Three Main Types of the Idea of the Atonement, Gustaf Aulen.

Open Penal Substitution

Why It Is Open Anselm framed punishment and satisfaction as alternatives and chose satisfaction, while the Reformed doctrine makes the satisfaction consist in the punishment being borne, and moves the setting from a court of honour to a criminal one. Both a continuity reading and a discontinuity reading are argued by serious historians of doctrine, and each has a stake in the answer: continuity supports the claim of an unbroken Western tradition, discontinuity supports the charge of a sixteenth century innovation.

What Would Settle It A study of the sixteenth century Reformed texts tracing exactly where the penal vocabulary enters, which medieval sources those writers were reading, and whether they understood themselves to be restating Anselm or correcting him. Their own statements about what they were doing have not been collected in one place.

Expertise Needed Historical theology; Reformation studies; medieval intellectual history

Question posed in The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, 3rd revised edition, F. L. Cross and E. A. Livingstone (eds.).

Open Marabout

Why It Is Open Colonial officials applied the word to a very wide range of Muslim religious figures, and the ethnography written under that administration is the channel through which most of the outside literature received it. Historians of the archive and specialists on the orders read the evidence differently and both readings are current.

What Would Settle It A systematic comparison of pre-colonial Arabic-language sources from the Maghreb and the western Sahel against the colonial administrative record, to establish the indigenous range of the term independently of the reporting.

Expertise Needed History of West and North Africa; Arabic manuscript studies

Question posed in The Sufi Orders in Islam, J. Spencer Trimingham, Chapters on the orders in North and West Africa.

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.