Open Questions

Open Chet, Avon and Pesha

Why It Is Open The three terms stand together in Leviticus 16 and Exodus 34 without any definition attached, and the graded reading is supplied by rabbinic literature centuries afterwards. Whether biblical Hebrew already distinguishes the three roots this way, or whether the distinction is a rabbinic construction laid over a rhetorical triplet, is a question of lexical semantics that this entry did not attempt to settle.

What Would Settle It A corpus study of every occurrence of the three roots in the Hebrew Bible, read alongside the Northwest Semitic epigraphic material, testing whether the intention grading holds independently of the rabbinic gloss.

Expertise Needed Biblical Hebrew lexicography; Northwest Semitic philology

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

Open Kaba'ir and Sagha'ir

Why It Is Open The manual is standardly cited under the name of Shams al-Din al-Dhahabi and is one of the most reproduced texts on the subject, but the attribution has been questioned, and this entry could not settle it from the sources available to it. The entry therefore describes the work without asserting authorship.

What Would Settle It A manuscript study of the earliest surviving copies and their transmission chains, compared against al-Dhahabi's securely attributed writings for method, vocabulary and the authorities he cites.

Expertise Needed Arabic manuscript studies; Islamic intellectual history

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

Open Sin as Illness in Orthodox Theology

Why It Is Open Twentieth century Orthodox theology drew the contrast strongly and rested a great deal of it on the reading of a single clause of Romans 5:12. Other scholars hold the difference is overdrawn, and that Greek writers do at times speak of an inherited culpability. Both positions are held now, and the atlas carries the fact as debated rather than choosing between them.

What Would Settle It A systematic survey of the Greek patristic corpus for language of inherited culpability, conducted independently of the Romans 5:12 reading, with the Latin material read on the same terms and by the same criteria.

Expertise Needed Patristics; historical theology

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

Open The Sworn Book of Honorius (Liber Juratus)

Why It Is Open The Sworn Book of Honorius names Honorius of Thebes as the magician who compiled it at the direction of an assembly of masters. No document outside the Liber Juratus tradition itself mentions such a person, no Theban connection is corroborated, and the framing assembly of eighty-nine masters reads as a legitimating device rather than a record. The name may belong to a real compiler, to a deliberate pseudonym, or to a confusion with one of the popes named Honorius, to whom a separate grimoire was later ascribed.

What Would Settle It A datable manuscript, charter, university record or inventory naming a magician of that name independently of the Sworn Book, or a codicological study of the surviving manuscript families that placed the attribution earlier or later than the text it introduces.

Expertise Needed Medieval Latin palaeography and codicology, with the history of learned magic.

Question posed in Grimoires: A History of Magic Books, Owen Davies.

Open Tituba

Why It Is Open The 1692 court papers record her enslaved status and her testimony and nothing about her birth, her passage or her later life. Elaine Breslaw's reconstruction of an Arawak origin by way of Barbados works from indirect records and is explicitly circumstantial; other readings of the same material remain open, and the later life is a blank rather than a dispute.

What Would Settle It Documentary evidence tying her to a named vessel, cargo manifest, inventory, parish register or estate record, in Barbados, Massachusetts or elsewhere. A subsequent record of her under any name after 1693 would answer the second half.

Expertise Needed Colonial American and Caribbean archival history; the history of slavery and of Atlantic shipping records

Question posed in Tituba, Reluctant Witch of Salem: Devilish Indians and Puritan Fantasies, Elaine G. Breslaw, Breslaw, Tituba, Reluctant Witch of Salem.

Open Ginans

Why It Is Open Ginans are attributed to named pirs of the Satpanth mission, but the surviving Khojki manuscripts are considerably later than the men they name, the corpus went on growing after those men had died, and an attribution in this tradition asserts lineage and authority as well as composition. Scholars therefore treat the ascriptions as traditional rather than as established, without being able to say which texts are early.

What Would Settle It Systematic dating of the Khojki manuscript collections, and linguistic analysis of the corpus against securely dated South Asian texts of the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries, would let the earlier strata be separated from the later. The manuscripts were catalogued only in the twentieth century and much of that comparative work has not been done.

Expertise Needed Manuscript studies, South Asian historical linguistics and Ismaili studies

Question posed in Songs of Wisdom and Circles of Dance: Hymns of the Satpanth Ismaili Muslim Saint, Pir Shams, Tazim R. Kassam.

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 Beowulf

Why It Is Open The one manuscript is dated on palaeographic grounds to about 975 to 1025, and that date is not seriously contested. The date of composition is, and estimates have ranged across three centuries. Arguments from metre, from linguistic archaism, from the historical allusions and from the poem's Christian frame have each been made to carry the case and each has been answered. The atlas records the manuscript date as a date and the composition date as disputed, rather than choosing.

What Would Settle It A dating argument that does not depend on assumptions about the transmission it is trying to establish. Linguistic and metrical tests have been the most productive line, and a test whose result is independent of whether the poem was copied and modernised on its way to the surviving manuscript would settle far more than another reading of the historical allusions.

Expertise Needed Old English philology, historical linguistics and metrics, palaeography

Question posed in Klaeber's Beowulf and the Fight at Finnsburg, fourth edition, R. D. Fulk, Robert E. Bjork and John D. Niles (eds.).

Open Brahmi Old Tamil Llla 𑀵

Why It Is Open The conventional account places the earliest Tamil-Brahmi cave inscriptions of Tamil Nadu several centuries before the common era, on palaeographic grounds and by comparison with the Ashokan material. Excavations at sites in the region have since been read as supporting a considerably earlier beginning, on the basis of stratigraphy and of radiocarbon determinations from associated deposits rather than from the inscribed objects themselves. The two accounts rest on different kinds of evidence and there is no agreed method for weighing one against the other, so this is not a case of two camps reading one body of evidence in opposite ways; it is a case in which the date has not been established.

What Would Settle It Direct dating of the inscribed objects rather than of the deposits around them, together with a published stratigraphic account that ties an inscribed sherd securely to a dated layer, and an independent palaeographic sequence for the southern letters built from the southern material itself rather than calibrated against the northern hands.

Expertise Needed South Asian archaeology, radiocarbon dating and Tamil epigraphy

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

Open Uk Ѹ

Why It Is Open The manuscript tradition gives 400 to uk. The printed Church Slavonic tables give it to izhitsa. Both usages are attested and they cannot both be right for any one book, so a number in the four hundreds cannot be read without knowing which tradition the source follows. The atlas records the value on both letters for that reason, which is a compromise rather than an answer.

What Would Settle It A survey of dated Slavonic manuscripts and early printed books recording which letter carries 400 in each, by region and by period, which would establish whether the printed usage is an innovation of the printers, an inheritance from one recension, or a correction toward the Greek series.

Expertise Needed Slavic palaeography and the history of Slavonic printing

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

Open Sha Ш

Why It Is Open Roughly a dozen Early Cyrillic letters have no Greek model. The majority reading derives them from Glagolitic, which is older and already fitted to Slavonic. A second reading compares sha, tsy and zhivete with Hebrew or Samaritan letters, an argument made since the nineteenth century. A third holds that shapes this simple cannot support either claim. No exemplar of either alphabet survives from the ninth century, when the choices were made, so every argument runs on shape comparison against later manuscripts.

What Would Settle It A dated exemplar of either alphabet from the period of composition, or a decisive argument from the internal structure of the two letter sets rather than from resemblance between individual shapes. Failing either, a rigorous statistical treatment of shape similarity that establishes what level of resemblance would count as evidence at all.

Expertise Needed Slavic palaeography, with Semitic epigraphy for the comparative claims

Question posed in Byzantine Missions Among the Slavs: SS. Constantine-Cyril and Methodius, Francis Dvornik.

Open Shta Щ

Why It Is Open The letter is plainly built on sha. Whether the element below it is the letter tverdo, making the letter a Cyrillic ligature, or whether the whole sign was taken from the Glagolitic letter for the same cluster and redrawn to match sha, is argued. Both accounts are current and the shape is compatible with either.

What Would Settle It A close comparison of the earliest attested forms of the letter across the recensions, looking for a period or region in which the two elements are still drawn separately, which would settle the ligature reading, or for early forms too remote from sha and tverdo to be a ligature at all.

Expertise Needed Slavic palaeography

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

Open San Religion

Why It Is Open There is no answer on record and nobody holds a position, because the evidence to hold one was never gathered. Wilhelm Bleek and Lucy Lloyd recorded /Xam between 1870 and 1884 and their work ended when their narrators went home and no further speakers could be found. The neighbouring communities of the southern and eastern Cape were recorded by no one. Their languages have no speakers and their descendants were absorbed into other communities. The San religion described in the scholarly literature is therefore the religion of the /Xam and of a small number of twentieth-century northern groups, generalised, and the generalisation covers an absence rather than a consensus.

What Would Settle It Recovery of further colonial-era linguistic or missionary material comparable to the Bleek and Lloyd notebooks: unpublished mission-station vocabularies, magistrates' and travellers' notebooks, or word lists held in South African, Dutch, German and British archives that have not been catalogued as linguistic material and so have not been looked for. A systematic archival survey aimed at this specific question has not been carried out. Failing that, the question stays open permanently, which is itself worth recording.

Expertise Needed Historical linguistics of the Khoisan languages; archival research in southern African, Dutch, German and British colonial and mission collections; southern African social history.

Question posed in Specimens of Bushman Folklore, W. H. I. Bleek and L. C. Lloyd.

Open Serer Religion

Why It Is Open This is a gap rather than an argument. The monument fields at Sine-Ngayene, Wanar, Wassu and Kerbatch, inscribed by UNESCO in 2006, were built over a long span and have been partially excavated, but no excavator has been able to attach them to a named present-day people, and no scholar has published a positive attribution to defend. Serer oral tradition, recorded most fully by Henry Gravrand, connects the monuments to Serer forebears and reads the burials as those of ancestors who are now among the pangool. Historians have neither confirmed that reading nor produced a rival one; they have set it aside as unproven and moved on, which leaves the question with no position holding the field.

What Would Settle It A dated burial and ceramic sequence from a securely stratified excavation across several of the monument fields, combined with ancient DNA from the tumuli burials and comparison against present-day Serer, Wolof and Mandinka populations. Radiocarbon coverage of the circles is thin and unevenly published, and no aDNA programme has been directed at the Senegambian monuments. Community consultation with Serer authorities would need to precede any sampling.

Expertise Needed West African archaeology; archaeogenetics; Senegambian oral history and its evaluation as a historical source.

Question posed in Stone Circles of Senegambia, UNESCO World Heritage List, UNESCO World Heritage Committee.

Open Saint

Why It Is Open The comparative literature has not settled this. Using one tradition's word for the others carries with it a juridical, posthumous and universal notion of holiness that the wali, the tzadik, the sant and the arhat do not each share, and specialists in those fields regularly object to the translation. There is no agreed replacement term.

What Would Settle It A sustained comparative study working from each tradition's own vocabulary outward rather than from the English word inward, and testing whether any set of features is genuinely shared across them.

Expertise Needed Comparative religion; religious studies

Question posed in The Oxford Dictionary of World Religions, John Bowker (ed.), s.v. Saint.

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 The Quran

Why It Is Open Fourteen of the twenty-eight Arabic letters, exactly half the alphabet, appear disjoined at the opening of a number of suras. The classical commentary tradition records a wide range of proposals for what they do and returns no agreed answer, and one position long held within that tradition is that the meaning was not disclosed. Modern scholarship has added further proposals without producing a consensus either. This is not a case of two camps disagreeing; it is a case in which no reading has been established.

What Would Settle It Nothing in the manuscript record settles the meaning, and it may not be settleable. What would narrow it is evidence that bears on the openings as written objects rather than as a puzzle: systematic collation of the earliest codices for whether and how the letters are set off, and a distributional study relating the sets of letters to the suras that carry them.

Expertise Needed Quranic studies, Arabic philology and early Islamic manuscript palaeography

Question posed in The Study Quran: A New Translation and Commentary, Seyyed Hossein Nasr (editor-in-chief).

Open The Origin of Tituba of Salem Village

Why It Is Open The word carried a wide and shifting range in a Massachusetts court of the period, and the clerks who used it were not making an ethnographic determination. The reconstruction of an Arawak origin by way of Barbados rests on that word plus indirect household and shipping records, and no direct evidence of her birth or passage has been found.

What Would Settle It A study of how colonial Massachusetts clerks used the term across a large corpus of records in the same decades, set against any direct documentary trace of her arrival.

Expertise Needed Colonial American archival history; historical linguistics of legal and administrative usage

Question posed in Tituba, Reluctant Witch of Salem: Devilish Indians and Puritan Fantasies, Elaine G. Breslaw, Breslaw, Tituba, Reluctant Witch of Salem.