Disputed Statements

Second Sudanese Civil War, Wars & Conflicts

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Death Toll Minimum

Currently States 1900000.000000

Millard Burr's documented tally for the U.S. Committee for Refugees, covering violence, war-related famine and disease, and government policy in southern and central Sudan across the war's 1983 to 1998 span: at least 1.9 million dead, a wartime count compiled under conditions where undercounting rather than overcounting is the likelier bias.

Source Quantifying Genocide in the Southern Sudan, 1983-1998 (Burr), Millard Burr tier 2

Second Sudanese Civil War, Wars & Conflicts

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Death Toll Maximum

Currently States 2000000.000000

The round figure of about two million dead, the commonly cited total for the war's full 1983 to 2005 span in standard reference treatments and consistent with Douglas Johnson's own history of the war, extending Burr's 1998 tally forward across the war's remaining seven years.

Source The Root Causes of Sudan's Civil Wars (Johnson), Douglas H. Johnson tier 1

Second Temple Menorah, Artifacts & Relics

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Last Secure Attestation

Currently States Rome (Temple of Peace); untraced after the later 2nd century CE

Steven Fine's The Menorah: From the Bible to Modern Israel (Harvard University Press, 2016) traces the Second Temple menorah's documented history after its depiction on the Arch of Titus in Rome, commemorating its capture in 70 CE. Fine's method is a documentary trace of the object's claimed later locations, and he finds the traditions placing it afterward in Carthage under the Vandals, in Constantinople under Justinian, or ultimately in the Vatican are none of them independently verified by any securely dated source, so the Arch of Titus relief remains the last point at which the menorah's location can be documented with confidence.

Source The Menorah: From the Bible to Modern Israel, Steven Fine tier 1

Second World War, Wars & Conflicts

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Death Toll Minimum

Currently States 60000000.000000

The lower end of the widely cited global range for World War II deaths from all causes, matching the National WWII Museum's own published breakdown of fifteen million battle deaths and forty five million civilian deaths. Some national tallies inside this figure remain contested, China's civilian toll above all, which the museum itself notes might on its own exceed fifty million.

Source World War II Casualties (Wikipedia), Wikipedia contributors tier 3

Second World War, Wars & Conflicts

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Death Toll Maximum

Currently States 75000000.000000

The upper end of the range this atlas records, synthesizing national archives, postwar demographic studies, census losses and international commission figures. Some popular accounts cite a still higher ceiling near eighty five million, but that figure rests on less precise demographic reconstruction of famine and disease deaths and is not adopted here as a bound.

Source World War II Casualties (Wikipedia), Wikipedia contributors tier 3

Second World War, Wars & Conflicts

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Displaced (Low Estimate)

Currently States 11000000.000000

The narrower of two figures the National WWII Museum publishes: approximately eleven million displaced persons remained in Europe when the war ended, eight million of them in Germany, the immediate postwar refugee caseload Allied administrators had to house and repatriate.

Source The Last Million: Eastern European Displaced Persons in Postwar Germany, The National WWII Museum staff tier 2

Second World War, Wars & Conflicts

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Displaced (High Estimate)

Currently States 55000000.000000

The broader of two figures the same source publishes: World War II uprooted and dislocated some fifty five million people in Europe alone across the war's full span, a total wartime displacement figure rather than the narrower postwar caseload. No single demographer's reconciliation of the two figures into one settled total was located; they measure different things, and this atlas records both as its bounds rather than resolving them into one number.

Source The Last Million: Eastern European Displaced Persons in Postwar Germany, The National WWII Museum staff tier 2

Secularization, Doctrines

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Standing as a Comparative Category

Currently States Used, but its validity as a comparative category is disputed

The Encyclopedia of Religion (Macmillan Reference, 2005) records that the strong secularization thesis, that modernity necessarily erodes religion, has been abandoned by several of the sociologists who built it, Peter Berger most publicly recanting his own earlier position. A revised version, restricted to Western Europe and to institutional participation rather than to belief, is still argued by other sociologists of religion and still contested by those pointing to persistent religiosity elsewhere.

Source Encyclopedia of Religion, Mircea Eliade (ed.); Lindsay Jones (ed., 2nd ed.) tier 1

Secularization, Doctrines

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Status Within the Tradition

Currently States Genuinely disputed within this tradition

The Encyclopedia of Religion (Macmillan Reference, 2005) records that the classical secularization thesis, that modernization necessarily brings religious decline, was the sociological consensus through much of the twentieth century. It is now contested, with critics examining global religious trends rather than only Western Europe and pointing to persistent and resurgent religiosity elsewhere as evidence against a single global pattern.

Source Encyclopedia of Religion, Mircea Eliade (ed.); Lindsay Jones (ed., 2nd ed.) tier 1

Sed Festival, Rituals

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Origin Period Start Year

Currently States -3100

3100 BCE marks the conventional start of the First Dynasty, from which its own text says depictions of the festival run. The same text states plainly that some kings recorded jubilees on a schedule their actual reigns cannot support, a problem Egyptologists read as evidence the festival's real periodicity and even its precise origin are not settled by the surviving record.

Source The Oxford Encyclopedia of Ancient Egypt, Donald B. Redford (ed.) tier 1

Sefer HaRazim (Book of the Mysteries), Esoteric Texts

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Era of Composition

Currently States Generally dated by scholars to somewhere between the third and fifth centuries CE, in the late antique period, based on its content and its affinities with the wider corpus of Greco-Egyptian and Jewish magical literature from that era, though the text's composite, orally transmitted background makes a precise date genuinely difficult to fix.

The work survives only in later manuscript and geniza fragments reconstructed by modern scholarship into a single critical edition, and no single fragment carries an internal date, so every proposed range rests on comparative content and vocabulary rather than direct dating evidence.

Source Sefer Ha-Razim: The Book of the Mysteries (Michael A. Morgan), Michael A. Morgan, translator, based on Mordecai Margalioth's critical Hebrew reconstruction tier 1

Sefer Yetzirah (Book of Formation), Esoteric Texts

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Attributed Author / Compiler

Currently States Jewish tradition long credited the text to the patriarch Abraham himself, a legendary attribution scholarship does not accept; who actually composed it, and in what century, remains argued rather than settled, with proposals ranging from an anonymous early rabbinic author to a much later medieval compiler.

Scholars remain divided because the work carries no internal claim of authorship beyond its legendary Abrahamic frame, and no external witness names a historical author independently of that legend. Those who favor an earlier date read its ideas as consistent with early rabbinic modes of thought, while those who favor a later date point to vocabulary and conceptual parallels with early medieval material, and neither position has displaced the other.

Source Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, Gershom Scholem tier 1

Seidr, Disciplines

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Contested or Appropriated Modern Use

Currently States Gendered stigma attached to male practitioners

Whether a male practitioner of seidr genuinely incurred the social stigma of ergi described in Lokasenna, or whether that passage is poetic insult rather than a description of settled social fact, is discussed rather than resolved among scholars of Old Norse religion.

Source Dictionary of Northern Mythology, Rudolf Simek, translated by Angela Hall tier 1

Sek, Haab Months

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Meaning in the Attesting Source

Currently States Commonly glossed as death, though this reading is among the weaker ones in the series: the colonial form and the Classic-period glyph do not map onto one another as cleanly as they do for months named after animals.

The gloss rests on the colonial Yucatec word rather than a confirmed decipherment of the sign, so it is treated as conventional rather than established.

Source Relacion de las cosas de Yucatan, Diego de Landa tier 2

Selene, Deities

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Origin of the Name

Currently States Selene's name is generally derived from the Greek word selas, meaning light or brightness, though some scholars connect it instead to an older root for the moon itself shared across Greek's Indo-European relatives; either reading ties her name directly to the light she personifies.

Source The Oxford Classical Dictionary, 4th edition, Simon Hornblower, Antony Spawforth and Esther Eidinow (eds.) tier 1

Seleucid Empire, Empires & Polities

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Religious Policy

Currently States Ordinary Hellenistic patronage of local cults, broken once: whether the measures of 167 BCE against the Jerusalem Temple were a royal persecution of Judaism, unique in antiquity, or a king backing one side in a Jewish quarrel between hellenizers and traditionalists, is a long-standing argument

Bickerman argued the initiative came from the hellenizing Jerusalem priesthood; the older reading, taken from First and Second Maccabees, makes Antiochus IV the author of a deliberate persecution. Both remain current.

Source The God of the Maccabees: Studies on the Meaning and Origin of the Maccabean Revolt, Elias J. Bickerman tier 1

Self-emptiness (rangtong): things are empty of their own inherent existence, Beliefs & Restrictions

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Point in Dispute

Currently States Whether a purely negative emptiness can account for what the tantras say is realised. That is the standing objection from the other-emptiness side, and the argument between the two has run for six centuries.

Self-emptiness, rangtong, the settled position of the Gelug tradition and held in its own form by the Sakya, reads emptiness as an absence found in the thing itself: a person, a mind and ultimate reality alike are empty of any nature standing on its own, with nothing left over once that negation is made. On this reading, treating the ultimate as a positive presence of any kind risks reintroducing the very grasping the teaching is meant to remove. Stearns's study of the rival Jonang tradition's founder records the six-century-old argument between this position and other-emptiness, shentong: shentong proponents hold that a purely negative account of emptiness cannot explain what the tantras describe as actually realised in meditative experience, while rangtong proponents, the standing Gelug objection, hold that any positive residue is exactly the permanent self the Buddha's teaching on emptiness was meant to rule out. The dispute has run for six centuries between two living traditions each transmitting its own reading of the same third-turning scriptures, and it remains unresolved because neither side's textual reading has been shown to be impossible from within the shared canon.

Source The Buddha from Dolpo: A Study of the Life and Thought of the Tibetan Master Dolpopa Sherab Gyaltsen, Cyrus Stearns tier 1

Selket, Deities

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Origin of the Name

Currently States Richard H. Wilkinson's The Complete Gods and Goddesses of Ancient Egypt (Thames & Hudson, 2003) reads Selket's name, also written Serqet, as usually understood to be a shortening of a longer Egyptian phrase meaning she who causes the throat to breathe, a name tying her venom cult, invoked against scorpion and snake bites, to its opposite, restoring breath to the choking or the dead, consistent with her role as one of the four goddesses guarding the coffin and canopic jars in funerary practice.

According To Ancient Egyptian Religion

Source The Complete Gods and Goddesses of Ancient Egypt, Richard H. Wilkinson tier 2

Semah, Sacred Dances

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Contested or Appropriated Modern Use

Currently States Whether semah should be performed outside the cem, on stages and at festivals, is disputed within the community.

One camp holds that public performance has protected a tradition long suppressed and misdescribed, and cites the UNESCO inscription in support. The other holds that a service lifted out of the cem stops being that service. Both positions are widely held among Alevi associations and neither has prevailed.

Source Semah, Alevi-Bektasi Ritual, UNESCO tier 1

Semitic, Language Families

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Homeland Hypothesis

Currently States Either the Levant and the Arabian peninsula, where the branch is attested from the beginning, or Africa, if Afro-Asiatic began there and Semitic is the branch that left it.

The dispute is inherited from the level above and cannot be settled at this one. If Afro-Asiatic originated in Africa, which is the majority position among those who work on the phylum, then Semitic is its only branch to have moved substantially out of the continent, and the Semitic homeland question becomes a question of when and by which route. If Afro-Asiatic began in the Levant instead, Semitic never left. The Semitic evidence on its own is compatible with both, which is why the argument is conducted at the Afro-Asiatic level and not here.

Source The Semitic Languages, Robert Hetzron (ed.) tier 1