Disputed Statements

Homer, Historical Figures

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Lifespan or Floruit Start Year

Currently States -750

The Oxford Classical Dictionary records that antiquity itself could not agree when Homer lived: Herodotus placed him some four hundred years before his own time, near 850 BCE, while other ancient writers proposed dates centuries earlier, closer to the Trojan War itself. Modern scholarship generally favors the second half of the eighth century BCE, built from the linguistic layering of the poems and from the archaeological horizon their material culture implies, with one quantitative linguistic study proposing 762 BCE specifically, but no consensus fixes an exact year, and the underlying Homeric Question, whether one poet composed the Iliad and Odyssey or the name stands for a tradition crystallized by more than one hand, means even the eighth century date describes when the poems took shape rather than a documented individual life.

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

Homer, Historical Figures

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Lifespan or Floruit End Year

Currently States -700

No source, ancient or modern, distinguishes a death year from a birth year for Homer; the entire dating debate concerns when the Iliad and Odyssey took their surviving form, not a tracked biography with two separate endpoints. The marker recorded here pairs with the debated eighth century BCE floruit recorded under lifespan-start-year and should be read the same way, as a conventional span around the disputed compositional date rather than an attested lifespan; some scholars place the Odyssey's composition later than the Iliad's, into the following century, which is part of why even this pairing is not settled.

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

Honduras, Countries

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Religious Composition

Currently States Almost entirely Christian, but now split nearly evenly between the Catholic Church and Evangelical Protestant churches; Pew's 2014 survey found 46 per cent Catholic and 41 per cent Protestant, and several later national polls have found Evangelicals the larger group.

Honduras's religious composition has shifted faster than almost anywhere else in Latin America, from a Catholic share above 90 per cent two generations ago to a near-even split today: Pew Research Center's 2014 survey found 46 per cent Catholic and 41 per cent Protestant, overwhelmingly evangelical, and several later national polls conducted since have found Evangelicals the larger of the two groups rather than Catholics. The disagreement recorded here is over which group currently holds the larger share, since Pew's single 2014 figure and the more recent national polls point in different directions, a genuine disagreement between survey instruments and dates rather than a dispute over the underlying trend, which every source agrees runs from Catholic toward Evangelical. Because the shift has been unusually fast and still apparently in progress, a survey conducted a few years after another can show a materially different balance without either being wrong, and only a survey conducted at or after the report's own date could say with confidence which group currently holds the larger share nationally.

Source Religious Composition of the World, 2010-2020, Pew Research Center tier 2

Hongaku (Original Enlightenment), Doctrines

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Point in Dispute

Currently States Whether a teaching that declares the world as it stands already awakened leaves any reason to practise, and whether it worked to make existing social arrangements unquestionable. Both criticisms have been pressed inside Japan and outside it.

Source Original Enlightenment and the Transformation of Medieval Japanese Buddhism, Jacqueline I. Stone tier 1

Honi the Circle-Drawer's Rain, Miracles

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Investigation Verdict

Currently States Josephus's Antiquities independently describes a renowned rainmaker named Onias, active in the same period, whom most historians identify with the Mishnah's Honi.

The Mishnah records Honi ha-Meagel, a first century BCE Jewish miracle-worker, drawing a circle and refusing to leave it until God sent the rain he asked for during a drought. Flavius Josephus's Antiquities of the Jews independently records a renowned rainmaker named Onias, active in the same general period, whom most historians identify with Honi despite the two accounts describing his eventual fate differently. The atlas's cited edition is the eighteenth century Antiquities translation compiling Josephus's history of this period. The method is comparative textual identification, weighing the two accounts' shared reputation for rainmaking and rough contemporaneity against the fact that neither text names or cross-references the other directly, the kind of evidence that would make the identification certain. Because the identification rests on shared reputation and contemporaneity rather than mutual naming, it is widely accepted as the best explanation but is not treated as certain.

Source Antiquities of the Jews, Flavius Josephus tier 1

Honi the Circle-Drawer's Rain, Miracles

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Skeptical Explanation

Currently States Josephus reports Onias was stoned to death during a civil war for refusing to curse a besieged faction, while rabbinic tradition tells later stories of Honi's life without recording that death.

Josephus's Antiquities of the Jews reports that Onias, the rainmaker most historians identify with the Mishnah's Honi ha-Meagel, was stoned to death during a first century BCE civil war after refusing to curse the faction besieging his own community's leader. Rabbinic tradition, by contrast, tells later stories about Honi's life, including a report of a lengthy sleep, with no account of a death by stoning. The atlas's cited text is the eighteenth century Antiquities edition carrying Josephus's account. The method is comparative source criticism, reading the two traditions' endings for the same figure against each other for whether they can be reconciled as the same life differently remembered or represent a genuine discrepancy. Because no surviving source reconciles the two endings, historians treat the unresolved ending as the strongest evidence against certainty in the Onias-Honi identification, even though the identification otherwise remains the most widely accepted reading.

Source Antiquities of the Jews, Flavius Josephus tier 1

Hope, Virtues

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Origin Period

Currently States Stated by Paul at 1 Corinthians 13, a letter most scholars date to the mid 50s CE during his Ephesus ministry, though the precise year is not fixed. Unlike the cardinal virtues, already current in pagan Greek philosophy centuries earlier, hope's status as a named theological virtue begins with this Pauline text.

Source The Holy Bible, Anonymous (multiple authors) tier 1

Hopi Prophecy, Prophecies

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Claimed Fulfillment

Currently States The "gourd of ashes" sign read as describing nuclear weapons, and roads, wires and colonisation read as describing other listed signs.

These readings are offered by Hopi spokespeople themselves as the meaning of signs framed in general terms; whether the correspondence was intended in advance or fitted afterward to known twentieth century events is not a question this atlas can settle from the published record.

Source Book of the Hopi, Frank Waters, with Oswald "White Bear" Fredericks tier 3

Hori ϩ, Alphabet Letters

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Origin Period

Currently States Greek letters wrote Egyptian from about the first century CE, settled by the fourth

According To The Coptic alphabet of Christian Egypt

The World's Writing Systems (Peter T. Daniels and William Bright, eds., Oxford University Press, 1996) surveys the small corpus of Old Coptic texts, pre-Christian magical and astrological papyri in which Egyptian was first written out using Greek letters plus a few signs borrowed from Demotic, against the standardised Coptic used in Christian scripture translation from around the third century CE onward. Comparing the two corpora, its contributors find the evidence thin enough to support two readings: that the Old Coptic magical texts already fixed the practice of writing Egyptian in Greek-based letters, or that the Christian translation project, needing a stable and teachable orthography for scripture, was the decisive act that standardised the script that survives. Because both readings draw on the same handful of surviving texts and no source describes an official act of decision, the volume treats the question as open rather than favouring either camp.

Source The World's Writing Systems, Peter T. Daniels and William Bright (eds.) tier 1

Horse, Animals & Totems

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Contested or Appropriated Modern Use

Currently States The words spirit animal and totem are used in popular Western practice for a personal animal ally. Native scholars and communities object to both usages, on the ground that they take the vocabulary and the authority of particular Indigenous traditions and apply them to a generic and commercial practice.

Suzanne Owen's The Appropriation of Native American Spirituality (Continuum, 2008) documents the objection Indigenous communities in North America raise, ongoing and in the present tense, against the commercial "spirit animal" genre. Owen's study examines how the practice borrows specific Indigenous terms and claimed lineages, presenting them as licensing a service sold to outside customers, and sets that use against the communities' own accounts of what those terms and practices mean within their traditions. What is disputed, on Owen's reading, is not that people generally feel a kinship with animals, a widely attested feeling that belongs to no one tradition, but the specific commercial borrowing of Indigenous vocabulary and claimed authority. The atlas records the animal, records that the modern commercial practice exists, and records that this documented objection is made, without adjudicating between the parties.

Source The Appropriation of Native American Spirituality, Suzanne Owen tier 1

Horse, Dream Symbols

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Meaning in the Attesting Source

Currently States The manual ascribed to Ibn Sirin reads the horse as rank, honour and good fortune, and as travel or advancement, a fine mount betokening standing.

According To Islamic oneiromancy (attributed to Ibn Sirin)

The reading given here is drawn from Muntakhab al-Kalam fi Tafsir al-Ahlam, the dream-interpretation manual that circulates under the name of the early Islamic scholar Muhammad Ibn Sirin, who died in 728 CE. Comparing the manuscript history against Ibn Sirin's own lifetime, the received compilation is instead ascribed to al-Dari, working around the fifteenth century, more than seven hundred years after Ibn Sirin's death, which is why his authorship is treated as a traditional attribution carried by the text's popularity rather than a historical fact the manuscript record supports. The specific dream-symbol reading is recorded as this manual's content, not as Ibn Sirin's own words.

Source Muntakhab al-Kalam fi Tafsir al-Ahlam (attributed to Ibn Sirin), Attributed to Muhammad Ibn Sirin (d. 728 CE); the received compilation is later, ascribed to al-Dari (15th c.) tier 3

Horus, Figures

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Lineage

Currently States The Osiris myth cycle itself makes Horus the posthumous son of Isis and Osiris, conceived after Isis's magical revival of her husband's body. An older Heliopolitan tradition instead makes "Horus the Elder" one of the five children of Geb and Nut, a sibling of Osiris, Isis, Set and Nephthys rather than their son; New Kingdom religion increasingly merged the two figures into one Horus.

Ancient Egyptian sources genuinely disagree by tradition rather than telling one story two ways: the Osirian cycle makes Horus the posthumous son of Isis and Osiris, while the earlier Heliopolitan cosmogony names a separate "Horus the Elder" as a child of Geb and Nut. Plutarch records both traditions still current in the Ptolemaic period.

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

Hoy (Ha) ሀ, Alphabet Letters

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Meaning in the Attesting Source

Currently States Why the script was vocalised in the fourth century CE, after centuries of writing consonants alone, is argued and not settled

According To The Ge'ez script

The World's Writing Systems (Peter T. Daniels and William Bright, eds., Oxford University Press, 1996) reviews the Aksumite inscriptions that first show Ge'ez written with vocalisation, a fourth-century CE innovation that is not in dispute, and canvasses three explanations for why it happened then: an internal development inside the Aksumite royal chancery seeking a more precise script for administration; a response to the newly Christian court's need for scripture translated and taught with unambiguous vowels after Aksum's conversion under King Ezana; and influence carried by vocalised Indian scripts reaching the Aksumite court through Red Sea trade contact. Comparing the timing, the epigraphic evidence and the trade record for each explanation, the volume's contributors find none conclusive, since Aksum's fourth-century contacts touched all three at once; the dating of the change is settled, its cause is not.

Source The World's Writing Systems, Peter T. Daniels and William Bright (eds.) tier 1

Hubert Pearce, Historical Figures

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Key Experiment

Currently States The Pearce-Pratt distance series, in which he called cards being turned in another building on the Duke campus

J. B. Rhine and J. G. Pratt's A Review of the Pearce-Pratt Distance Series of ESP Tests (Journal of Parapsychology, 1954) reported card-guessing trials conducted with Hubert Pearce at Duke University in the 1930s, in which Pearce and the experimenter were in separate buildings on campus. Rhine and Pratt's method recorded and scored Pearce's card guesses against a randomised deck sealed with the experimenter, and the reported above-chance results were contested by later critics, notably C. E. M. Hansel, on the grounds that the physical layout of the two buildings involved left open an ordinary sensory or signalling route between experimenter and subject that the original protocol had not ruled out.

Source A Review of the Pearce-Pratt Distance Series of ESP Tests, J. B. Rhine and J. G. Pratt tier 1

Huey Tecuilhuitl, Veintenas

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Approximate Gregorian Span

Currently States Late June into mid July

Scholars have proposed several correlations between the xiuhpohualli year and the Gregorian calendar. The month range given here follows one widely reproduced reconstruction and is offered for relative placement only, not as a settled date: the 365 day count carried no intercalated leap day, so its alignment with the solar year is understood to have drifted across the centuries of its use, and colonial era testimony was recorded decades after the practice had ended.

Source The Aztecs (Smith, 3rd edition), Michael E. Smith tier 1

Huey Tozoztli, Veintenas

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Approximate Gregorian Span

Currently States Early to late April

Scholars have proposed several correlations between the xiuhpohualli year and the Gregorian calendar. The month range given here follows one widely reproduced reconstruction and is offered for relative placement only, not as a settled date: the 365 day count carried no intercalated leap day, so its alignment with the solar year is understood to have drifted across the centuries of its use, and colonial era testimony was recorded decades after the practice had ended.

Source The Aztecs (Smith, 3rd edition), Michael E. Smith tier 1

Huineng, Figures

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Historicity

Currently States Historically attested

The Princeton Dictionary of Buddhism, edited by Robert E. Buswell Jr. and Donald S. Lopez Jr. (Princeton University Press, 2014), records Huineng as a historical figure but examines the account of him in the Platform Sutra against the text's own compilation history, finding it to be a sectarian construction of the later Southern Chan school rather than a reliable record of his life, and the dictionary accordingly does not read the Platform Sutra's narrative as biography.

Source The Princeton Dictionary of Buddhism, Robert E. Buswell Jr. and Donald S. Lopez Jr. tier 1

Huldra, Mythical Creatures

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Lineage

Currently States Regional Norwegian and Swedish traditions disagree on how dangerous the huldra fundamentally is, with some legend cycles treating her as a genuinely threatening seducer who leads men to their ruin and others as a lonely, marriageable figure whose humanity a devoted husband can restore; Kvideland and Sehmsdorf's collection preserves both readings from different tellers rather than resolving them into one consistent character.

Huli Jing, Mythical Creatures

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Contested or Appropriated Modern Use

Currently States Accounts of huli jing range from dangerous seducers who drain a victim's vital essence to benevolent or morally ambiguous figures who reward kindness, and the moral reading shifts considerably by period and text.

Source Chinese Mythology: An Introduction, Anne Birrell tier 1

Human Beings Author Their Own Acts and God Judges Them Justly, Beliefs & Restrictions

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Point in Dispute

Currently States Whether justice is a standard reason can recognise and measure God by, or whether justice is simply whatever God does. Every subsequent position in Islamic theology takes a side on that question.

Divine justice, adl, is a formal principle of faith in Mutazili, Zaydi, Twelver and Ismaili theology, holding that God is just by a standard reason can recognise, that He does not command the impossible or punish what He himself caused, and that human beings must therefore genuinely originate their own acts to be justly judged for them. W. Montgomery Watt's translated selection of classical Islamic creeds, a mid-twentieth-century translation later Islamic studies scholarship has refined on points of detail, sets this position against the competing Ashari position that justice is simply whatever God does, so that reason has no independent standing to measure or constrain divine action. The dispute concerns whether justice is a standard God is bound by or a term that only describes whatever He in fact does, a question that in turn decides whether human free authorship of action is required for divine judgement to be called just at all. Every later position in Islamic theology on free will and predestination takes a side on this question, which is why it has remained a live dividing line rather than a settled premise.

Source Islamic Creeds: A Selection, W. Montgomery Watt tier 1