Open Questions

Open Musaylima

Why It Is Open Every reported revelation of his survives only as quotation inside the writings of the tradition that defeated him, presented in order to be ridiculed, and no manuscript, inscription or non-Muslim notice offers a control. This is a gap rather than a dispute: no scholar holds a position on the content of his teaching, because there is nothing independent to hold a position about.

What Would Settle It A documentary or epigraphic find from al-Yamama independent of the Islamic historiographical tradition, or an early non-Muslim notice of the Hanifa movement of the 630s.

Expertise Needed Arabian epigraphy and early Islamic historiography

Question posed in The Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd edition, P. Bearman, Th. Bianquis, C. E. Bosworth, E. van Donzel and W. P. Heinrichs (eds.).

Open Elsie Wheeler

Why It Is Open Every account of her, including this entry, is drawn from Marc Edmund Jones's own description of her in his writing on the 1925 Sabian sitting. No independent biographical, genealogical or newspaper record naming her birth or death year has surfaced in the sources checked for this entry.

What Would Settle It A genealogical or California newspaper archive search for a clairvoyant medium named Elsie Wheeler active in the San Diego area in the 1920s, or a period Theosophical Society membership record naming her.

Expertise Needed Biographical and archival research

Question posed in The Sabian Symbols in Astrology, Marc Edmund Jones.

Open Johannes Angelus

Why It Is Open The degree images printed under the name of Johannes Angelus in 1488 are generally traced to earlier material circulating in manuscript and associated with the name of Pietro d'Abano, but the atlas has no citable study collating those manuscripts against the incunable. Without one, a statement that a particular degree image originates in this book cannot be checked, and the printed edition risks being treated as a source when it may only be a witness.

What Would Settle It A collation of the surviving manuscript witnesses of the degree image material against the 1488 Augsburg printing, establishing the recension the editor worked from and the extent of editorial change.

Expertise Needed History of astrology; incunable and manuscript studies; textual criticism

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

Open The Sethian Curse Tablets of Rome

Why It Is Open The atlas records this page's language as Latin, which renders as a language chip. The standard scholarly description of the group Wunsch published in 1898, the tablets from a columbarium on the Via Appia, reports it as largely Greek, with the charioteers, horses and factions carrying Latin names. The two statements cannot both be right, and no page-level citation for either has been located yet. The neighbouring British tablets, Bath and Uley, are correctly Latin, which is probably how the value arrived here.

What Would Settle It A language census of the tablets in Richard Wunsch, Sethianische Verfluchungstafeln aus Rom, Leipzig 1898, counting the edited texts by script and noting any Latin written in Greek letters. The edition is public domain and already catalogued in this atlas. R. S. Conway reviewed it in the Classical Review 13.4, May 1899, pages 224 to 226. Audollent, Defixionum Tabellae, 1904, also catalogued here, carries further tablets of the class and would corroborate. If the group is genuinely bilingual, the finding is not a corrected language value but that a single recorded language cannot describe this page, and that is the more useful result.

Expertise Needed Epigraphy and the papyrology of the Greek magical corpus

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

Open Nahas (Na) ነ

Why It Is Open A few Ge'ez letter names are transparently words in the language: bet is a house, gaml is a camel, and the word behind res is the word for a head. Most are not, and several, nahas among them, resemble Ge'ez words closely enough to invite a gloss that nothing supports. The atlas records no meaning for those letters, which is a statement about the evidence and leaves open whether the Ethiopian tradition itself ever attached senses to them.

What Would Settle It A survey of the Ge'ez grammatical and church-school literature for any indigenous account of the letter names, set against the comparative reconstruction of the Northwest Semitic names, would show whether an Ethiopian gloss tradition exists and what it says.

Expertise Needed Ethiopian philology and the history of the traditional church schools

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

Open Payt (Pha) ጰ

Why It Is Open Payt writes an ejective p, which has no Semitic ancestor. It is usually explained as a sign made by altering tayt, on the resemblance of the two forms and on the position of payt late in the order, but the explanation is an inference from shapes rather than a documented act, and it competes with an account deriving both Ge'ez p letters from Greek.

What Would Settle It A palaeographic sequence for both letters from dated Aksumite material, showing whether the earliest forms of payt resemble tayt more closely than the later ones do, would test the derivation directly.

Expertise Needed Ethiopian epigraphy and Semitic palaeography

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

Open Psa (Pa) ፐ

Why It Is Open Psa writes a plain p, a sound Ge'ez did not inherit, because the Semitic p had become f in this branch. The letter therefore has to be an addition to an order that was already fixed, and two explanations circulate: that it is the Greek pi, borrowed with the Greek names and vocabulary that made a p letter necessary, and that it is a modification of an existing fidel sign. Both are readings of the letterform and of its position at the end of the order. Neither rests on a document.

What Would Settle It Dated Aksumite and post-Aksumite inscriptions and manuscripts showing the earliest forms of psa and payt, read against the Ancient South Arabian signary and against Greek letterforms in use in Aksum, would show whether the sign entered the script from outside or was built inside it.

Expertise Needed Ethiopian epigraphy and Semitic palaeography

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

Open Azu Ⰰ

Why It Is Open Three explanations are held in the literature and none has carried the field. One derives the letters from the Greek minuscule cursive of the ninth century. One looks to Semitic and Caucasian models, among them Hebrew and Samaritan, Coptic, Armenian and Georgian. One holds that Constantine composed the signs from a small set of Christian figures, the cross, the circle and the triangle, so that the alphabet would belong to no existing script and would carry a Christian sense in its shapes. This is a genuine disagreement rather than a gap: camps exist and each can be read. What none of them has is a witness close in date to the alphabet, since the earliest Glagolitic manuscripts are a century or more later than the mission and were produced in a different country.

What Would Settle It A securely dated ninth century Glagolitic witness, or the recovery of one from the under-text of a palimpsest by multispectral imaging, would give the shapes a form early enough to be compared against the proposed models rather than against their tenth and eleventh century descendants. Failing that, a systematic morphological comparison of the whole Glagolitic repertoire against dated Greek minuscule hands and against the Semitic and Caucasian scripts proposed, published with the negative results as well as the positive ones, would establish how much of the resemblance survives measurement.

Expertise Needed Slavic palaeography; Greek palaeography; comparative script studies; multispectral imaging of palimpsests

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

Open Slovo Ⱄ

Why It Is Open The first twenty letter names are ordinary Slavonic words and read together as connected clauses, from azu buky vede, I know letters, through ritsi slovo tvrido, say the word firmly. That much is not in question. What is in question is what follows from it. One position holds that the names were chosen deliberately so that the recitation of the alphabet would itself be an utterance, a piece of design in keeping with an alphabet made for the reading of scripture. Another holds that the names are largely inherited mnemonic words, that the sense of the sequence is a reading imposed later, and that the point is settled against composition by the fact that the names stop meaning anything at all from the twenty third letter onward. Both positions are held and both can be read.

What Would Settle It A ninth or tenth century source that gives the letter names in full as a continuous text, rather than as a list, would show the sequence being read as an utterance at a date close to the alphabet's making. The acrostic alphabet poems of the Old Church Slavonic tradition, which arrange the letters in verse, are the most likely place for such evidence, and a study that separated what those poems inherit from what they compose would bear directly on the question.

Expertise Needed Old Church Slavonic philology; Slavic historical linguistics; medieval Slavonic literature

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

Open Pe Ⱊ

Why It Is Open The letter is encoded in the Unicode Standard and appears in the abecedaria, the alphabet lists copied out as exercises or inscriptions, more often than in running text. The reference literature reads it as a form of p without establishing what distinguished it from the ordinary letter for that sound, and different sources place different numeral values in this part of the order. Nobody holds a position on the question, which is why the atlas records the letter with no numeral value rather than choosing among the values on offer. It is an unfilled gap and not an argument between camps.

What Would Settle It An attestation of the sign in running text, in a context where the word it writes can be identified, would settle the sound. A survey of every surviving Glagolitic abecedary, recording where this sign falls in the order and whether it is ever given a numeral value in the list, would settle whether it was counted as a letter of the alphabet or carried as a variant.

Expertise Needed Slavic palaeography; codicology; Old Church Slavonic philology

Question posed in The Unicode Standard, The Unicode Consortium.

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 União do Vegetal

Why It Is Open The date is agreed in every account, including the church's own. The place is not. The church describes the founding as taking place in the Amazon forest without naming a settlement, and several accounts place it at a rubber camp near the Bolivian frontier, while widely circulated reference summaries give the town of Porto Velho instead.

What Would Settle It The church's own founding records and the recollections of the first members, read against Brazilian civil registration and land records for the rubber camps of the upper Madeira in 1961.

Expertise Needed Brazilian religious history and archival research

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

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 Affaire de Bizoton

Why It Is Open No trial transcript survives. The case is known only through accounts by foreign observers who had arrived already persuaded of the charge, above all Spenser St John, who published his twenty years afterwards and who recorded that the confessions had been beaten out of the accused. The court proceeded in French before Creole-speaking defendants, and the Haitian government, seeking diplomatic recognition, had an interest in a public conviction watched by European envoys. No scholar holds a reconstruction of the events, because there is nothing to reconstruct one from.

What Would Settle It Recovery of Haitian judicial or police records for 1864, whether in Port-au-Prince or in the French, British and American consular archives that received contemporary reports, together with a critical edition of the surviving foreign accounts collated against one another rather than read singly.

Expertise Needed Caribbean archival history and the history of criminal justice, with Haitian Creole and nineteenth-century French palaeography.

Question posed in Hayti, or the Black Republic, Spenser St John.

Open The Deorala Sati of 1987

Why It Is Open Contemporary accounts contradict one another completely, and no court has made a finding. The prosecutions for abetment and for glorification ran for decades and ended in acquittals, the last in 2024, so nothing was ever established judicially. Witnesses were villagers in a community under intense external scrutiny, and the accounts collected at the time were gathered by parties with declared positions on the question.

What Would Settle It A judicial or commission finding on the abetment question, which the acquittals have now foreclosed; failing that, a scholarly reconstruction that collates the police record, the contemporary press, the depositions and the investigations by women's organisations against one another and states what each can and cannot support. Such a collation has not been published.

Expertise Needed Legal history and the sociology of contemporary India, with access to the Rajasthan police and trial record.

Question posed in The Commission of Sati (Prevention) Act, 1987, Parliament of India.

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 Fatwa Against Salman Rushdie

Why It Is Open The Iranian government stated in September 1998 that it had no intention of threatening the author's life and would not encourage anyone to do so. It did not describe that as a revocation. Iranian clerical bodies and the foundation that offered a reward have held that a ruling of this kind cannot be withdrawn after the death of the jurist who issued it, and the reward has been publicly reaffirmed since. The two positions are held by different institutions in the same state and neither has been withdrawn.

What Would Settle It A published juristic analysis, from within the school concerned, of whether a ruling of this kind survives its issuer and what act would be required to end it. A clear statement from the authority claiming successor jurisdiction would settle the practical half.

Expertise Needed Islamic jurisprudence, Twelver Shia; contemporary Iranian legal and political history

Question posed in From Fatwa to Jihad: The Rushdie Affair and Its Legacy, Kenan Malik.

Open The Herem on Baruch Spinoza

Why It Is Open The writ was entered in the minute book of the Talmud Torah congregation of Amsterdam and no act rescinding it has been catalogued here. The ban was of a kind that could be lifted on submission, and Spinoza never submitted. Proposals to lift it have been raised publicly in modern times, and the atlas has not verified a decision in either direction, nor identified who would have the standing to make one now.

What Would Settle It The minute books of the Amsterdam Portuguese Jewish congregation for any later entry on the case, or a statement from the congregation or its rabbinate. A finding that no such act exists is equally useful and would close the question.

Expertise Needed Early modern Jewish history; Dutch archival research; halakhic scholarship on the law of the ban

Question posed in Spinoza: A Life, Steven Nadler.

Open The Eight Garudhammas

Why It Is Open Several of the eight presuppose an order of nuns that already exists and has its own procedure, which they cannot have had at the moment of foundation. The sixth requires ordination from both communities, which is impossible for the first generation and is contradicted within the same collections. Six of the eight appear elsewhere in the discipline as ordinary rules, each with its own account of the incident that occasioned it. The Pali, Chinese and Tibetan recensions differ in wording and in order. Tradition places the rules at the founding of the bhikkhuni order during the Buddha's own ministry, but the Buddha's own dates are themselves unsettled and no source assigns the rules a specific year within it.

What Would Settle It Comparative work across all surviving recensions of the foundation account, including those preserved only in Chinese and Tibetan translation, with attention to which items are stable across lineages that separated early. Bhikkhu Analayo and Ute Husken have carried this a long way and the field has not converged. Independently, a firmer scholarly resolution of the Buddha's own chronology, or textual evidence dating the rules apart from the ordination narrative that carries them, would settle the date even where the recension question remains open.

Expertise Needed Buddhist studies; Pali, Chinese and Tibetan vinaya philology

Question posed in The Foundation History of the Nuns' Order, Bhikkhu Analayo.

Open The Words of Institution

Why It Is Open The received East Syriac text has no institution narrative, and the Holy See judged eucharists celebrated with it valid in 2001 on the ground that the words are present in the prayer in a dispersed form. Whether the narrative was omitted, was lost in transmission, or was never there is argued from the manuscript tradition and from the structure of the prayer, and this run could not establish which reading holds the field.

What Would Settle It A study of the earliest East Syriac manuscript witnesses and their variants, set against the structure of the related Syriac anaphoras, together with the responses published by liturgical scholars to the 2001 guidelines.

Expertise Needed Liturgical history; Syriac manuscript studies

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