Disputed Statements

Kava, Plants

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Toxicity

Currently States Herbal extracts were linked to severe liver injury around 2000 and banned in several countries

Subsequent review found most implicated products used solvent extraction or included peel and aerial parts, which the traditional water extraction of peeled root excludes. Most bans were later lifted or narrowed. The traditional preparation appears safer than the industrial one sold in its name.

Source Kava: The Pacific Drug, Vincent Lebot, Mark Merlin and Lamont Lindstrom tier 1

Kegare, Doctrines

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Historical Note

Currently States Scholar Bernard Scheid argues the exclusion of death from Shinto religious rites became possible only once Buddhism could take charge of handling death.

A scholarly interpretation offered by Bernard Scheid, not an established consensus on when the death taboo entered kami worship.

Source Kegare (Wikipedia)

Kenosis, Doctrines

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Contested or Appropriated Modern Use

Currently States Nineteenth century kenotic theologians proposed that divine attributes such as omniscience were genuinely set aside at the incarnation, a stronger claim than most patristic writers made, criticized for risking the Son's full divinity.

Source The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, 3rd revised edition, F. L. Cross and E. A. Livingstone (eds.) tier 1

Kentucky, States & Territories

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Origin of the Name

Currently States No single derivation is agreed. Proposed Iroquoian and Shawnee roots have been read as meadow, prairie, or land of tomorrow, and historians treat none of these as certain; the popular nineteenth century gloss of the name as dark and bloody ground is now regarded as frontier folklore rather than an attested translation.

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

Ketheric Body, Aura Layers

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Origin Period Start Year

Currently States 1987

According To Seven-layer aura (Barbara Brennan, Hands of Light)

Kurt Leland's Rainbow Body: A History of the Western Chakra System from Blavatsky to Brennan (Ibis Press, 2016), which traces the aura and chakra literature through to Brennan, dates Barbara Ann Brennan's Hands of Light, the same book credited elsewhere on this page with fixing the seven named aura layers and their pairing with the seven chakras, to 1987 by its publisher's catalogue record, while some other library catalogues list the same first edition as 1988. Leland notes the one-year discrepancy without resolving it; it most likely reflects the ordinary gap between a book's stated copyright year and its public release the following year, a common source of one-year catalogue disagreements. The atlas's own articles on the aura layers follow 1987, and this property records that year while flagging the alternative rather than asserting either flatly.

Source Rainbow Body: A History of the Western Chakra System from Blavatsky to Brennan, Kurt Leland tier 1

Ketheric Body, Aura Layers

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Origin Period End Year

Currently States 1987

According To Seven-layer aura (Barbara Brennan, Hands of Light)

Kurt Leland's Rainbow Body: A History of the Western Chakra System from Blavatsky to Brennan (Ibis Press, 2016), which traces the aura and chakra literature through to Brennan, dates Barbara Ann Brennan's Hands of Light, the same book credited elsewhere on this page with fixing the seven named aura layers and their pairing with the seven chakras, to 1987 by its publisher's catalogue record, while some other library catalogues list the same first edition as 1988. Leland notes the one-year discrepancy without resolving it; it most likely reflects the ordinary gap between a book's stated copyright year and its public release the following year, a common source of one-year catalogue disagreements. The atlas's own articles on the aura layers follow 1987, and this property records that year while flagging the alternative rather than asserting either flatly.

Source Rainbow Body: A History of the Western Chakra System from Blavatsky to Brennan, Kurt Leland tier 1

Ketoret, Incense

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Contested or Appropriated Modern Use

Currently States The Talmud's eleven spice enumeration at Keritot 6a cannot be fully reconstructed with confidence today, because at least one of the eleven, onycha, is not securely identified with any known substance.

Scholars agree on most of the eleven from the philology and the trade record, but not all. Where an ingredient's identity is itself unsettled the atlas records that as its own unknown on the ingredient's page rather than smoothing over the gap here.

Source The Babylonian Talmud, Anonymous (multiple authors) tier 1

Khadijah bint Khuwaylid, Figures

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Lifespan or Floruit End Year

Currently States 619

The source gives this year as about, its own approximate estimate rather than a fixed date.

Source The Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd edition, P. Bearman, Th. Bianquis, C. E. Bosworth, E. van Donzel and W. P. Heinrichs (eds.) tier 1

Khai ϧ, 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

Khai ϧ, Alphabet Letters

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Origin Period

Currently States Grouped with the letters taken from Demotic, but its derivation is not settled

According To The Coptic alphabet of Christian Egypt

Khai is conventionally listed among the seven Coptic letters taken from Demotic, but its origin has been read in more than one way. One position derives it from a Demotic sign in its own right, on the pattern of the other six. Another treats it as bound up with hori, the Coptic letter for h, rather than as an independent borrowing. The atlas records that the readings differ and does not choose between them; nothing about how the letter is used in the Bohairic liturgy depends on the answer.

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

Khakkha ਖ, Alphabet Letters

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Origin Period

Currently States Sikh tradition credits Guru Angad, the second Guru, with giving the script its settled form in the sixteenth century

According To The Gurmukhi script

Two reference works give incompatible accounts. The Encyclopaedia of Sikhism (Harbans Singh, editor-in-chief, Punjabi University, Patiala, 1998) carries the Sikh tradition that Guru Angad, the second Guru (1504-1552), devised the script. The World's Writing Systems (Peter T. Daniels and William Bright, eds., Oxford University Press, 1996), surveying the paleography of Indic scripts, holds instead that the letterforms were already in mercantile use in the Punjab as one of the Landa scripts descended from Sharada, and that comparing those existing Landa forms against the Gurmukhi letters attested from Guru Angad's era shows a fixing and standardising of a repertoire already in circulation rather than an invention from nothing. Neither side has displaced the other because the two accounts read different kinds of evidence, a community's own historical memory against a comparative script lineage, and the atlas records both without adjudicating.

Source The Encyclopaedia of Sikhism, Harbans Singh (editor-in-chief) tier 2

Khakkha ਖ, Alphabet Letters

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Origin Period

Currently States Historians of Indic writing place the letterforms earlier, in the Landa mercantile hands already used across the Punjab

According To The Gurmukhi script

Two reference works give incompatible accounts. The Encyclopaedia of Sikhism (Harbans Singh, editor-in-chief, Punjabi University, Patiala, 1998) carries the Sikh tradition that Guru Angad, the second Guru (1504-1552), devised the script. The World's Writing Systems (Peter T. Daniels and William Bright, eds., Oxford University Press, 1996), surveying the paleography of Indic scripts, holds instead that the letterforms were already in mercantile use in the Punjab as one of the Landa scripts descended from Sharada, and that comparing those existing Landa forms against the Gurmukhi letters attested from Guru Angad's era shows a fixing and standardising of a repertoire already in circulation rather than an invention from nothing. Neither side has displaced the other because the two accounts read different kinds of evidence, a community's own historical memory against a comparative script lineage, and the atlas records both without adjudicating.

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

Khamsa, Sacred Objects & Ritual Items

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Status Within the Tradition

Currently States Reformist and Salafi scholars class protective amulets as attaching power to a created thing and therefore as forbidden, while popular use has continued

According To Islam

The khamsa, a hand-shaped amulet widely worn and displayed across North Africa and the Middle East by both Muslims and Jews as protection against the evil eye, sits in tension with Islamic legal opinion that treats amulet use as bordering on or constituting shirk, associating protective power with an object rather than with God alone. Roel Meijer's edited volume Global Salafism: Islam's New Religious Movement (2009) records that reformist and Salafi religious opinion, working from a strict reading of tawhid, divine unity, holds such amulets doctrinally impermissible, while long-standing popular practice across the same Muslim-majority societies continues to produce, wear and give khamsa amulets regardless of that ruling. The method is comparative religious sociology, reading published Salafi legal opinion against ethnographic and market evidence of continued popular use in the same communities. Because the reformist position is a minority theological stance within societies where the popular practice remains widespread, neither has displaced the other, and the doctrinal status remains disputed within the same populations.

Source Global Salafism: Islam's New Religious Movement, Roel Meijer (ed.) tier 1

Kharijites, Denominations

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Contested or Appropriated Modern Use

Currently States Whether Kharijite names a precise historical sect or a broader modern label

Kharijite is used both as a precise historical name for the 7th century secessionists and, more loosely and often pejoratively, for any modern militant group accused of declaring fellow Muslims apostate. Scholars caution against collapsing the two uses, since the historical Kharijites also produced the moderate, enduring Ibadi tradition that the modern polemical usage tends to obscure.

Source The Venture of Islam, Volume 1: The Classical Age of Islam, Marshall G. S. Hodgson tier 1

Khi ⲭ, 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

Khipu, Sacred Objects & Ritual Items

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Textual Note

Currently States Whether khipu also encode narrative or language beyond number is disputed. Gary Urton argues the medium's binary structural choices give it capacity well beyond accounting; others hold the cords numerical, with any narrative carried in the specialist's memory

According To Andean scholarship

Khipu are knotted cord devices used by the Inka and earlier Andean societies to record information, and scholars dispute whether the cords encoded a genuine writing system capable of recording narrative and administrative content directly, or functioned as mnemonic aids that prompted a trained specialist's memorised recitation rather than encoding the content itself. Gary Urton's Signs of the Inka Khipu: Binary Coding in the Andean Knotted-String Records (2003) argues from the cords' own physical construction, the direction of spin and ply, the knot types and their positions, that khipu carry a binary coding system capable of genuine information storage beyond simple numerical tallying. Colonial Spanish testimony describing khipu specialists, khipukamayuq, reading out histories from the cords is compatible with both positions equally, since a memorised performance and a genuinely decoded text would look identical to a Spanish observer who could not read the cords either way. The method combines statistical and structural analysis of surviving khipu with source-critical reading of the colonial testimony. Because no colonial witness could distinguish the two possibilities, and no confirmed decipherment has been achieved, camps genuinely exist on both sides.

Source Signs of the Inka Khipu: Binary Coding in the Andean Knotted-String Records, Gary Urton tier 1

Khmer Empire, Empires & Polities

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Associated Religion

Currently States Hinduism and Buddhism in succession. What the devaraja consecration of 802 actually established is argued: an older reading made the king a living god, while later scholarship reads it as the cult of a divine protector of kingship rather than the deification of the ruler

The god-king reading, associated with the earlier French scholarship of Angkor, and the divine-protector reading of more recent epigraphic work are both current in the literature.

Source The Civilization of Angkor, Charles Higham tier 1

Kildare, Sacred Sites

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Historicity

Currently States Gerald of Wales's The History and Topography of Ireland (1188, trans. John J. O'Meara, Penguin Classics), written some six centuries after Brigid founded her monastery at Kildare in the late fifth or early sixth century, is the source that reports the perpetual flame there still burning at his own twelfth century visit; historians of early Ireland debate whether that flame continues a pre-Christian fire cult on a site already sacred before Brigid, or whether the fire's pre-Christian association is itself a later hagiographic gloss over a purely Christian monastic observance.

Source The History and Topography of Ireland, Gerald of Wales (trans. John J. O'Meara) tier 2

Kimpa Vita, Historical Figures

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Lifespan or Floruit Start Year

Currently States 1684

The source marks this year circa, its own approximate estimate rather than a fixed date.

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

Kimpa Vita, Historical Figures

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Lifespan or Floruit End Year

Currently States 1706

The source marks this year circa, its own approximate estimate rather than a fixed date.

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