Disputed Statements

Saxon Wars of Charlemagne, Wars & Conflicts

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Death Toll Assessment

Currently States The one incident with a reported figure, the October 782 killing of Saxon prisoners near Verden after a revolt that had destroyed a Frankish army at the Suntel, is put at four thousand five hundred by the Royal Frankish Annals and its revised version, and that number is treated as broadly credible by military historians such as Bernard Bachrach and Alessandro Barbero, who note both sides could field forces in the tens of thousands. An older argument, made by Martin Lintzel in 1938 and resting on Hans Delbruck's theory that early medieval armies were small, holds the figure inflated, though Lintzel offered no alternative count of his own, and Barbero concludes that later attempts to argue the killing did not happen as described have not proved credible. No count exists at all for deaths across the war's other seventeen campaigns, its famines, or its forced deportations.

The war-wide toll is not attempted in the scholarship; only the Verden incident carries a reported number, and that number's reliability, not its scale, is what the historiography actually debates.

Scallop Shell of Saint James, Sacred Objects & Ritual Items

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Status Within the Tradition

Currently States The claim that the body of James the Greater lies at Compostela was reaffirmed by Leo XIII in 1884 and has never been established on historical evidence

According To Roman Catholicism

The scallop shell is the pilgrim emblem of the Camino de Santiago, tied to the tradition that the remains discovered at Compostela in the ninth century are those of the apostle James. Pope Leo XIII's 1884 apostolic letter Deus Omnipotens formally affirmed the Church's position that the relics are authentically the apostle's, resolving a question the Spanish church had asked Rome to settle. Historians of the shrine, working from the independently dateable archaeological and documentary record of the site's ninth-century emergence as a pilgrimage centre, treat the shrine's antiquity as well documented while treating the specific identification of the remains as James's own as unproven, since no evidence independent of the shrine's own tradition confirms it. The method is historical and archaeological, examining the documented emergence against what can be independently verified about the remains themselves. Because the Church's doctrinal affirmation and the historians' evidentiary standard answer different questions, both positions stand without either correcting the other.

Source Deus Omnipotens, apostolic letter on the relics of Santiago de Compostela, Pope Leo XIII tier 3

Scorpion, 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

Scots Confession, Creeds & Confessions

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Point in Dispute

Currently States How much of the text is Knox's own work rather than his five colleagues'.

Tradition names six drafters, all called John, and gives Knox the leading hand, which suits both his standing and the voice of the confession. Because no draft survives in any one man's hand and the four-day account is Knox's own, the division of labour among the six cannot be settled from the record, and readings that credit him with most of it and readings that treat it as genuinely committee work both remain available.

Source The Creeds of Christendom, with a History and Critical Notes, Philip Schaff tier 2

Sea of Japan, Bodies of Water

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Region

Currently States Bordered by Japan, South Korea, North Korea and Russia. The name is disputed: Korea calls the same water the East Sea and has pressed for dual naming at the International Hydrographic Organization, which in 2020 moved instead towards numeric identifiers for sea areas rather than settling the question.

Source Encyclopaedia Britannica (online academic reference), Encyclopaedia Britannica editors tier 2

Sea Thiasos Relief, Marriage of Neptune and Amphitrite (Glyptothek, Munich, 239), Sacred Art & Iconography

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Attributed To

Currently States The Hellenistic carving style has led some scholars to attribute the marine panels to the Greek sculptor Scopas the Younger, though the attribution is disputed and the monument's traditional association with Domitius Ahenobarbus himself has also been questioned; some specialists refer to it instead as the Paris-Munich reliefs, after the cities that now hold its separated panels, precisely because neither the sculptor nor the patron can be fixed with confidence.

Source Altar of Domitius Ahenobarbus (Wikipedia) tier 3

Seahorse, 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

Sebastian, Figures

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Historicity

Currently States Legendary: known from narrative tradition, not the historical record

According To Christianity

Jacobus de Voragine's Legenda Aurea (Golden Legend), compiled around 1260 and read in its 1993 Princeton translation, is the chief source for Sebastian's traditional life. Historians examining the archaeological and cultic record separately from the Legenda's narrative find his cult and burial site on the Appian Way in Rome are early and well attested, while the specific narrative events of his life survive only in devotional accounts compiled well after his death, with no source contemporary with a third century martyrdom.

Source Legenda Aurea (The Golden Legend), Jacobus de Voragine tier 1

Sebastian, Figures

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Manner of Death

Currently States Martyred

According To Christianity

Jacobus de Voragine's Legenda Aurea (1993 translation) and other hagiographic sources give differing dates for Sebastian's death: some place it as early as 288 CE, before the emperor Diocletian's empire-wide persecution of Christians formally began in 303. Historians examining the surviving texts find this chronological discrepancy is not resolved within them, since none of the sources are contemporary with the event they describe.

Source Legenda Aurea (The Golden Legend), Jacobus de Voragine tier 1

Sebastian, Figures

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Manner of Death Detail

Currently States The Legenda Aurea of Jacobus de Voragine (Princeton University Press, 1993 edition) transmits Sebastian's two stage martyrdom: shot with arrows by his own archers and left for dead, then nursed back to health in secret by the widow Irene, after which he confronted Diocletian directly and was clubbed to death on the emperor's renewed order; traditional dating for the episode ranges from around 288 to the empire-wide persecution of 303 to 311, since no source contemporary with the event fixes it precisely.

According To Christianity

Source Legenda Aurea (The Golden Legend), Jacobus de Voragine tier 1

Sebastian, Figures

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Historicity Detail

Currently States The Legenda Aurea, or Golden Legend, of Jacobus de Voragine (Princeton University Press, 1993 edition), a thirteenth century compilation written many centuries after Sebastian's death, is among the sources transmitting the narrative now attached to him: an officer in Diocletian's guard, exposed as a secret Christian, shot with arrows and left for dead, nursed back to health, then clubbed to death after confronting the emperor. Sebastian is venerated as an early martyr, but the Golden Legend and the earlier Passio texts it draws on are the only record of these details, with nothing contemporary with his death surviving.

According To Christianity

Source Legenda Aurea (The Golden Legend), Jacobus de Voragine tier 1

Sebastião Mota de Melo, Historical Figures

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns How Its Legacy Is Contested

Currently States Whether the Kardecist, Umbanda and other material brought in under his leadership is a development of Santo Daime or a departure from it.

Christopher Partridge's edited reference New Religions: A Guide (Oxford University Press, 2004) documents the doctrinal and organisational split within Santo Daime following Sebastiao Mota de Melo's leadership, between the Alto Santo line, which holds that founder Mestre Irineu's original teaching was already complete and that Mota de Melo's later additions are a departure from it, and the CEFLURIS line Mota de Melo founded, which holds the tradition legitimately continues to receive new hymns and understanding through the same visionary means that produced its original teaching. Partridge's reference method, situating the split within the wider comparative study of new religious movements, notes the division is doctrinal and organisational at once, and that almost all Santo Daime practice outside Brazil today descends through the CEFLURIS side of that split rather than the original Alto Santo line.

Source New Religions: A Guide, New Religious Movements, Sects and Alternative Spiritualities, Christopher Partridge (ed.) tier 1

Second Sudanese Civil War, Wars & Conflicts

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Religious Dimension

Currently States Historians divide over how central religion was to the war's causes. Douglas Johnson argues that the war's deeper and more durable causes were the political and economic marginalization of Sudan's peripheries, especially the south, by successive Khartoum governments, a dynamic that predates and outlasted any single government's religious policy, so that the 1983 Sharia imposition functioned as a proximate trigger and a potent unifying grievance rather than the war's root cause. Francis Deng, by contrast, frames the conflict substantially as a clash between an Arab-Islamic vision of Sudanese national identity promoted from Khartoum and an African, predominantly Christian and traditional-religion vision held in the south, arguing that the two sides' competing self-understandings, not merely their competing material interests, structured the war and its intractability. This atlas records the 1983 Sharia imposition as an attested trigger without adopting either camp's account of how central religious identity was to the war's underlying causes.

Source War of Visions: Conflict of Identities in the Sudan (Deng), Francis M. Deng tier 1

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