Open Questions

Open Fert Ф

Why It Is Open The first twenty letter names of both Slavic alphabets are ordinary Slavonic words and read together as connected sentences, from azu buky vedi, I know letters, through rtsy slovo tverdo, say the word firmly. After that point the names stop meaning anything recoverable. The reference literature records them as of uncertain or unknown origin and offers no reading. This is not a disagreement between scholars with rival etymologies; it is an absence. Nobody has established whether these names are corrupted Slavonic words, reflexes of Greek letter names, or labels that never meant anything at all, and the question has not been taken up.

What Would Settle It A systematic etymological study of the full set of Slavic letter names, working from the earliest abecedaria and from the acrostic alphabet poems of the Old Church Slavonic tradition, which arrange the names in verse and may preserve senses that the plain lists do not. A finding that the names are demonstrably meaningless would settle the question as firmly as a set of etymologies would.

Expertise Needed Slavic historical linguistics; Old Church Slavonic philology

Question posed in The World's Writing Systems, Peter T. Daniels and William Bright (eds.).

Open Avestan A 𐬀

Why It Is Open The script is placed in Sasanian Iran with reasonable confidence and its purpose is not in doubt, but no source names the person or the body that designed it. This is not a case of scholars holding rival candidates; there are no candidates. The work was begun and left without a conclusion.

What Would Settle It A Sasanian or early post-Sasanian text, a colophon in an early manuscript, or an inscription that names the deviser or the commissioning authority. Failing that, a comparative study of the earliest surviving Avestan hands against dated Pahlavi material, which might at least narrow the milieu.

Expertise Needed Iranian philology and Zoroastrian manuscript studies

Question posed in The World's Writing Systems, Peter T. Daniels and William Bright (eds.).

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.

Open Halqa ࡀ

Why It Is Open Hebrew, Syriac and Arabic all use their letters as figures, and Mandaic descends from the same Aramaic stock, so the practice would be unremarkable. No alphanumeric numeral system for Mandaic is described in the reference literature consulted, and the modern character standard encodes no Mandaic digits. Nothing states that the practice was absent either, so this is a gap rather than a disagreement.

What Would Settle It A survey of numbering in dated Mandaean manuscripts and inscribed lead rolls, checking colophons, quire marks and folio numbers for letters standing as figures, together with a reading of the standard Mandaic grammars on how numbers are written out.

Expertise Needed Semitic palaeography and Mandaean manuscript studies

Question posed in The Unicode Standard, The Unicode Consortium, Mandaic block, U+0840 to U+085F.

Open Raphael

Why It Is Open Until 2026-07-30 the site tagged Raphael as an Islamic archangel on the strength of a shared name alone, not through evidence. That tag was not carried across when religion membership for archangels was later reviewed: the Islamic identification runs through Israfil, and the atlas holds nothing establishing that the two figures are one and the same. Raphael's own name-origin properties tie him to the Book of Tobit and note his absence from the Hebrew Bible. Recording the identification would have been a guess, so it was left out and the question written down instead.

What Would Settle It A survey of classical Islamic angelology, hadith collections and tafsir establishing whether Israfil is identified with Raphael inside the tradition itself rather than only in later comparative writing, together with the earliest datable text that makes the equation. A positive finding is one recorded link between Raphael and Islam, with that source attached. A negative finding closes this question as withdrawn.

Expertise Needed Islamic studies, comparative angelology, history of religions

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

Open Uncle

Why It Is Open Lilly's catalogue of the sixth house names uncles and aunts on the father's side directly, and turning the chart from the fourth produces the same answer independently, but which of the two came first is not established here. The step may be a Hellenistic inheritance, an Arabic development, or a Latin systematisation, and the atlas has found no study that settles it. The answer matters because every derived reading of an extended relative inherits whatever assignment the parent's house is given.

What Would Settle It A textual comparison across the Hellenistic, Arabic and Latin house literature, identifying the earliest passage that derives a collateral relative from a parent house rather than simply listing that relative among a house catalogue, and dating the transmission of that step.

Expertise Needed History of astrology; Arabic and Latin manuscript studies; history of the exact sciences

Question posed in A History of Horoscopic Astrology, James Herschel Holden.

Open Mithraism

Why It Is Open The cult left no scripture, no liturgy and no doctrinal statement. The single line usually cited is a damaged painted inscription in the mithraeum under Santa Prisca in Rome, restored by its excavators to read as thanks for having been saved by shed blood; the restoration supplies missing letters, and even as restored it does not say what an initiate was saved from or for. Mithraists left no funerary formulae of the kind other cults of the period left in quantity, so there is nothing independent to test the reading against, and scholars working from the iconography alone have not settled it.

What Would Settle It A Mithraic text of any length: a liturgical papyrus, a doctrinal fragment, or a securely legible inscription stating the cult's teaching, recovered from an excavated mithraeum or from a papyrus collection. A body of Mithraic grave inscriptions would settle it indirectly, by showing what members expected of their own deaths.

Expertise Needed Roman archaeology, Latin and Greek epigraphy, papyrology

Question posed in The Roman Cult of Mithras: The God and His Mysteries, Manfred Clauss.

Open The Eleusinian Mysteries

Why It Is Open The prohibition on disclosure held for the whole life of the cult and no initiate left an account in any surviving text. Ancient writers describe the effect of the rite rather than its content. The only reports that claim to give content are by Christian polemicists writing centuries later from outside the cult, with an interest in making it appear either trivial or obscene, and there is nothing independent against which to test them. Excavation gives the hall and the small closed structure at its centre and nothing of what was done there.

What Would Settle It An ancient text by an initiate, or a document from the sanctuary's own administration describing the conduct of the rite, recovered by excavation at Eleusis or identified in a papyrus collection. Inscriptions from the sanctuary already record its finances and its officials, so a procedural record is not an impossible find.

Expertise Needed Classical archaeology, Greek epigraphy, papyrology

Question posed in Greek Religion, Walter Burkert.

Open The Sabians

Why It Is Open The Quran names the Sabians three times and gives no description of them. The two leading identifications, the Mandaeans of southern Iraq and the star-venerating people of Harran, rest on different kinds of evidence and point in different directions, and the Harranian case is complicated by a report that the name was adopted there in order to obtain protected status. The identification has been argued since the ninth century by parties with a legal interest in the answer.

What Would Settle It A securely dated pre-Islamic attestation of the name applied to a specific community, or documentary evidence of self-designation from either candidate group before the Abbasid period, would settle it. Failing that, a systematic comparison of the earliest Quranic commentaries against the Mandaean and Harranian source material could establish which identification the earliest readers actually held.

Expertise Needed Semitic philology, Quranic exegesis and its history, the archaeology and epigraphy of upper Mesopotamia, and Mandaean studies

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

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 Sarmoung Brotherhood

Why It Is Open The whole account descends from Gurdjieff's own writing and from what he told pupils. The Armenian manuscript he names has not been produced or identified, no location has been established, and no independent traveller, official or scholarly record of such a body has been found for a region that was heavily travelled and reported on. Positions divide between a traceable synthesis of available currents, a real but unnamed Sufi lineage, and a deliberate literary device, and no evidence has been produced for any of the three.

What Would Settle It Identification of the Armenian source named in the account, or of any manuscript using the name; archival work in Russian, Ottoman and British records of Central Asian travel for the relevant years; and comparative study of the movements against documented Sufi and Central Asian practice by scholars with access to both.

Expertise Needed History of Central Asian Sufism; Armenian manuscript studies; the academic study of Western esotericism

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

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 Saffron

Why It Is Open Recent genetic and iconographic evidence (Kazemi-Shahandashti et al. 2022) points to Bronze Age Greece, Crete and Santorini around 1700 BCE, anchored on Minoan fresco depictions and Crocus cartwrightianus genetics. Older scholarship long assumed an Iranian or Asia Minor origin instead, given saffron's overwhelming later importance in Persian culture and its trade-route common names; this atlas's own origin-region fact already records the question as debated among authorities, and the 2022 genetic study does not by itself settle a century-old debate.

What Would Settle It Further ancient-DNA or archaeobotanical sampling of Crocus material from Aegean, Anatolian and Iranian Bronze Age sites, and confirmation of whether Crocus cartwrightianus populations outside Attica also carry the ancestral genome the 2022 study used to anchor the Greek-origin claim.

Question posed in Ancient Artworks and Crocus Genetics Both Support Saffron's Origin in Early Greece, Seyyedeh-Sanam Kazemi-Shahandashti et al., Frontiers in Plant Science, 25 Feb 2022, doi:10.3389/fpls.2022.834416.

Open Indus Valley

Why It Is Open The Indus script that labels these seals has never been deciphered, so the horned seated figure on seal M-304 and its kin cannot be read against a text that would say who or what it depicts. The proto-Shiva reading popularized in early twentieth century scholarship rests on visual resemblance to later Hindu iconography (the seated posture, the horns, the surrounding animals), not on any legible caption, and Srinivasan's own iconological re-assessment finds the identification unsupported by the seal's own details.

What Would Settle It A decipherment of the Indus script that survives scholarly scrutiny, or an independently datable bilingual inscription pairing Indus signs with a known language, would let the seals be read on their own terms rather than through later Vedic or Hindu iconography projected backward onto them.

Expertise Needed Indus Valley archaeology, epigraphy and comparative iconography

Question posed in The So-Called Proto-Siva Seal from Mohenjo-Daro: An Iconological Assessment, Doris Meth Srinivasan.

Open Lucia dos Santos

Why It Is Open Her three biographical facts that depend on events after 2000, lifespan, manner of death and canonization, have not yet been recorded because the only Fatima sources this atlas holds are The Message of Fatima (2000) and the 2017 canonisation homily for her cousins. Neither can document a death in 2005 or a cause opened afterwards, and citing one of them anyway would be a fabricated citation. The facts are not disputed by anybody; they are simply not yet sourced. This is a sourcing gap, not a scholarly one.

What Would Settle It Any published record postdating February 2005: the Holy See's own announcement of her death, the Carmel of Coimbra's record, or the decrees of her cause as published in the Acta Apostolicae Sedis. Adding one such source to the catalogue would let all three facts be recorded and this question closed.

Expertise Needed Church history; Catholic canon law

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

Open Vishtaspa

Why It Is Open Nothing outside Zoroastrian tradition attests him. The traditional dating, which places Zarathustra 258 years before Alexander, appears to derive from an ancient confusion between this Vishtaspa and Hystaspes the father of Darius I, who is a different and later man. Linguistic dating of the Gathas places their composition many centuries earlier, in the second or very early first millennium BCE, somewhere in eastern Iran or Central Asia, which leaves the patron with no fixed place, date or external record.

What Would Settle It An epigraphic, archival or archaeological find naming Vishtaspa in a datable eastern Iranian or Central Asian context, or a decisive advance in the absolute dating of Old Avestan.

Expertise Needed Iranian philology; Central Asian archaeology; Avestan studies

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

Open Amsha

Why It Is Open The Rigvedic name is amsa, a share, and it stands sixth in the hymn that lists the Adityas. The Vishnu Purana's list of twelve, which is explicitly solar and assigns one Aditya to each month, carries a name usually rendered Amshu, from amsu, a ray or a soma stalk. The Bhagavata Purana's list has neither. No source consulted for this entry argues the identification in either direction.

What Would Settle It A collation of the Aditya lists across the Puranic manuscript traditions, reading the name in each recension rather than in a single printed translation, and a comparison with the Brahmana passages where the count of twelve first appears.

Expertise Needed Sanskrit philology and Puranic textual criticism

Question posed in Vishnu Purana, Anonymous, Book II, chapter 10.

Open Vidhatri

Why It Is Open Vidhatri has no myth, no iconography and no cult, and outside the formulaic pairing with Dhatri he barely occurs in Sanskrit. Yet the disposer becomes an ordinary way of naming destiny in later devotional and vernacular speech. Nothing in the surviving Sanskrit sources sets out how the one became the other.

What Would Settle It A philological trace of the Dhatri and Vidhatri pairing through Puranic, epic and regional devotional literature, showing where the formula stops naming an act of divine arrangement and starts naming an agent who fixes a person's lot.

Expertise Needed Sanskrit philology, and the study of regional devotional and vernacular literatures

Question posed in Vedic Mythology, Arthur Anthony Macdonell.

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 Diti

Why It Is Open Diti is named only a handful of times in the Rigveda, always in formulaic proximity to Aditi, with no hymn, no epithet and no story of her own. A figure of that antiquity with that little attached to her is unusual, and her full career begins only when the Puranic genealogists need two mothers.

What Would Settle It Comparative Indo-Iranian evidence for an independent figure behind the abstract noun, or a demonstration that the Vedic occurrences are all secondary to the divine name Aditi.

Expertise Needed Vedic philology and comparative Indo-Iranian linguistics

Question posed in Vedic Mythology, Arthur Anthony Macdonell.