Open Questions

Open Ahir Budhnya

Why It Is Open Budhna means bottom, base or root, and three readings are in use: the lower atmosphere, the floor of the sea, and the foundation of the world. The atmospheric reading rests on the company he keeps in the enumerations rather than on anything said about him, and the enumerations are formulaic.

What Would Settle It A Vedic or Brahmana passage that places him rather than merely lists him, or comparative evidence from Iranian material for a serpent of the deep whose location is specified.

Expertise Needed Vedic philology and comparative Indo-Iranian religion

Question posed in Vedic Mythology, Arthur Anthony Macdonell.

Open Nefertem

Why It Is Open The name is written nfr plus tm and both halves are ambiguous. It is read as "Atum is beautiful", making the god a statement about the creator, and it is read as "the beautiful one who closes", making it a description of the lotus shutting at dusk. The two readings imply different theologies and Egyptological reference works give both without settling between them.

What Would Settle It An early attestation where the name is written with a determinative or in a context that disambiguates tm as the divine name rather than the verb, or a demonstrably early orthography that rules one reading out.

Expertise Needed Egyptology, philology

Question posed in The Oxford Encyclopedia of Ancient Egypt, Donald B. Redford (ed.).

Open Nefertem

Why It Is Open Sekhmet is his mother in the Memphite triad, which is the arrangement most often reproduced, but Bastet and Wadjet are each named in other local traditions. It is not clear whether one of the three is original and the others are later local substitutions, or whether the triad itself is a Memphite systematisation of a god who began without a fixed parentage.

What Would Settle It A survey of the earliest attestations by site and date rather than by the standard triad, which would show whether the variation is chronological or purely geographical.

Expertise Needed Egyptology

Question posed in The Complete Gods and Goddesses of Ancient Egypt, Richard H. Wilkinson.

Open Soma

Why It Is Open At least three serious candidates have been argued at length and none is established. Wasson proposed Amanita muscaria in 1968; Flattery and Schwartz proposed Peganum harmala in 1989; ephedra is favoured on the grounds that it is the plant used in the living Zoroastrian Yasna, a ritual with no recorded break. Each fits some of the textual evidence and fails on other parts of it.

What Would Settle It A securely dated archaeobotanical find from an Indo-Iranian ritual context with residue analysis, or a philological argument that settles the disputed Rig Veda passages. A fourth possibility deserves testing: that the hymns are liturgical praise rather than pharmacological description, in which case a mild plant is sufficient and the search for a potent one is misconceived.

Expertise Needed Indology, Iranian and Avestan philology, archaeobotany, ethnobotany

Question posed in Soma: Divine Mushroom of Immortality, R. Gordon Wasson.

Open Byzantine Iconoclasm

Why It Is Open The persecution of iconophile monks and clergy under the iconoclast emperors is well attested in general terms, exiles, imprisonments, forced marriages and some executions, but every specific figure traces back to iconophile hagiography written decades later by the winning side, after the opposing texts had been suppressed or destroyed. No scholarly aggregate of deaths or of exiled monks and clergy across the whole period has been found.

What Would Settle It A modern historian's systematic count, cross checking the hagiographic accounts against archaeological, epigraphic or administrative evidence, of documented deaths and of monks and clergy exiled during the two iconoclast periods (726 to 787 and 815 to 843).

Expertise Needed Byzantine history, hagiography and source criticism.

Question posed in Byzantium in the Iconoclast Era, c.680-850: A History (Brubaker and Haldon), Leslie Brubaker and John Haldon.

Open The Persecution of Christians in Nigeria's Middle Belt

Why It Is Open USCIRF and other monitors document individual attacks and community-level deaths from Fulani militant violence against Nigerian Christians in the Middle Belt in detail, but no monitor separates a religiously motivated death toll from Nigeria's wider, overlapping farmer-herder and insurgent violence, so no campaign-wide aggregate isolated to religious persecution exists.

What Would Settle It A researcher or monitoring organization's systematic count of deaths in Middle Belt violence specifically attributable to religious targeting, distinguished from farmer-herder land disputes and from Boko Haram or ISWAP insurgent violence further northeast.

Expertise Needed Human rights documentation, conflict studies specific to the Nigerian Middle Belt.

Question posed in Nonstate Violators of Religious Freedom in Nigeria: Fulani Militants, United States Commission on International Religious Freedom.

Open Persecution of Christians in North Korea

Why It Is Open The United Nations Commission of Inquiry and other outside monitors document the North Korean state's treatment of Christians in detail, arrests, detentions, camp imprisonment and collective punishment of family members, but the country's total closure to independent verification means no monitor has ever published a defensible aggregate count of deaths tied specifically to religious persecution, as distinct from the wider political prison camp population.

What Would Settle It Independent access to North Korea's prison camp system, or a systematic accounting by a body with reliable access to defector testimony, that separates deaths attributable to religious persecution from the general political prisoner population, comparable to the disaggregated reporting already possible for detention and camp population estimates.

Expertise Needed Human rights documentation, North Korean studies.

Question posed in Report of the Commission of Inquiry on Human Rights in the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, United Nations Human Rights Council Commission of Inquiry on Human Rights in the Democratic People's Republic of Korea.

Open The Crackdown on House Churches in China

Why It Is Open Open Doors and ChinaAid document the crackdown on unregistered house churches in detail, raids, fines, arrests, imprisonments and building demolitions, but neither organization nor any other monitor of the campaign publishes a running or aggregate count of deaths tied to it, unlike the detention and demolition statistics both organizations do track case by case.

What Would Settle It A systematic count, by a monitoring organization or researcher, of documented deaths in custody or otherwise directly tied to raids, detention or demolitions against China's unregistered house church movement, comparable to the detention and demolition statistics these organizations already track.

Expertise Needed Human rights documentation, contemporary Chinese religious policy studies.

Question posed in China, Open Doors World Watch List Country Page, Open Doors research staff.

Open The Neronian Persecution of Christians (64 CE)

Why It Is Open Tacitus, writing roughly fifty years after the event and the near-sole near-contemporary source, describes an "immense multitude" convicted without giving any number, and no other source from within a century of the fire supplies one; the 979 figure sometimes quoted traces to Jerome's chronicle of the 390s CE, over three centuries later.

What Would Settle It No further ancient source is likely to surface at this distance; a systematic review of the archaeological and epigraphic record for first century Roman burial or execution sites tied to this specific episode could at best establish a documented floor rather than a true total.

Expertise Needed Roman imperial history; early Christian source criticism

Question posed in Tacitus, Annals, Book XV, Publius Cornelius Tacitus.

Open The Decian Persecution of Christians (250 to 251 CE)

Why It Is Open The surviving libelli document compliance, not casualties, and no ancient Christian writer or modern historian has reconstructed an aggregate death total for the roughly eighteen months of enforcement; only named individual executions are on record.

What Would Settle It A systematic collation of the named martyrologies and surviving correspondence across the persecution's eighteen months, of the kind that could establish a documented floor even without a claim to completeness.

Expertise Needed Roman imperial history; early Christian source criticism

Question posed in Persecution of Christians in the Roman Empire (Wikipedia).

Open The Persecution of Beta Israel Under Ethiopia's Solomonic Emperors

Why It Is Open The surviving Ethiopian chronicle record names individual episodes across two centuries of intermittent campaigns, the execution of the rebel leader Goshen and reports of mass suicide rather than conversion, but no ancient or modern historian consulted has attempted a running total across the whole span from Yeshaq to Susenyos.

What Would Settle It A systematic collation of the surviving Ethiopian royal chronicles across each named campaign, of the kind that could establish a documented floor for at least the better-recorded episodes even without a claim to completeness for the whole two centuries.

Expertise Needed Ethiopian history; Ethiopian royal chronicle studies

Question posed in History of the Jews in Ethiopia (Wikipedia).

Open The Valerian Persecution of Christians (257 to 260 CE)

Why It Is Open The surviving record names individual clergy executions in detail, including Sixtus II, Lawrence and Cyprian, but the 258 edict's own rank-based penalty structure for laity, degradation and confiscation short of death for many, means no ancient or modern historian consulted has reconstructed an aggregate death total across the whole three years of enforcement.

What Would Settle It A systematic collation of the named martyrologies and surviving contemporary correspondence, including Cyprian's own letters, across the persecution's three years, of the kind that could establish a documented floor even without a claim to completeness for the wider laity the second edict also targeted.

Expertise Needed Roman imperial history; early Christian source criticism

Question posed in Persecution of Christians in the Roman Empire (Wikipedia).

Open The Rohingya Genocide

Why It Is Open Access to Rakhine State was tightly restricted during and after the 2017 clearance operations, and the UN Fact-Finding Mission's own report states it could not establish a verified total; independent estimates published since range widely with no consensus figure.

What Would Settle It Independent forensic and demographic investigation inside Rakhine State, which Myanmar's government has not permitted at the scale required.

Expertise Needed Forensic demography and human rights investigation

Question posed in Report of the Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on Myanmar (A/HRC/39/64), United Nations Human Rights Council.

Open State Atheism in Albania

Why It Is Open Clergy and believers were imprisoned and executed under Communist Albania's religious ban, but no independent body has separated a cumulative death toll for the ban specifically from Enver Hoxha's wider political repression.

What Would Settle It Archival research in Albania's post-Communist state security records isolating religiously motivated cases from the regime's broader political imprisonments and executions.

Expertise Needed Archival history

Question posed in Irreligion in Albania (Wikipedia), Wikipedia contributors.

Open The First Fitna

Why It Is Open The Battle of Siffin and the Battle of the Camel are both remembered with specific traditional casualty figures, commonly around seventy thousand combined at Siffin alone, but those figures trace only to medieval chronicle compilations, chiefly al-Tabari drawing on Abu Mikhnaf, written under later dynasties with their own interest in the outcome. No modern historian has produced an independent whole-conflict synthesis to check them against.

What Would Settle It A modern historian's critical, source-by-source reassessment of the casualty claims in al-Tabari and the other early narrative sources, of the kind Bar Kokhba and the Sikh-Mughal Wars have each already received on this atlas, weighing the chronicles' reliability rather than repeating their totals.

Expertise Needed Early Islamic history; source criticism of the classical Arabic chronicle tradition

Question posed in The Succession to Muhammad: A Study of the Early Caliphate, Wilferd Madelung.

Open The Destruction of the Second Temple

Why It Is Open Josephus claims 1.1 million dead over the course of the siege; Tacitus gives six hundred thousand. Menahem Stern's standard critical edition of the classical sources treats Tacitus's figure, and by extension Josephus's higher one, as rhetorical rather than reliable, and proposes no replacement. No modern historian has converted demographic or archaeological evidence into a defensible death toll for the siege itself.

What Would Settle It A published demographic or archaeological reassessment of the siege's casualties, of the kind Raviv and Ben David produced for the Bar Kokhba War from settlement-survey evidence, applied to first-century Jerusalem's population and the siege's own documented timeline.

Expertise Needed Roman-period Judaean history; historical demography; classical source criticism

Question posed in Menahem Stern, Greek and Latin Authors on Jews and Judaism, Volume Two: From Tacitus to Simplicius (1980), Menahem Stern.

Open The Raid on Somnath in 1026

Why It Is Open Turko-Persian chronicles written after the fact give a formulaic figure of tens of thousands killed defending the temple, which Thapar's historiographical study reads as a rhetorical convention repeated across several unrelated conquest narratives of the period rather than a count, and contemporary Sanskrit and Jain inscriptions from Saurashtra do not corroborate it or even mention the raid.

What Would Settle It Independent corroborating evidence from the Saurashtra region itself, archaeological or epigraphic, of a kind that is entirely absent from the record as it stands, or a named modern historian's reasoned estimate in place of the chronicle's formulaic figure.

Expertise Needed Medieval South Asian history; Indology; epigraphy

Question posed in Somanatha: The Many Voices of a History, Romila Thapar.

Open The Huichang Persecution of Buddhism

Why It Is Open Ennin's eyewitness diary and official Tang records document the persecution's scale in detail, including the 260,500 monks and nuns returned to lay life, but neither they nor any later Chinese history drawing on them records a death toll.

What Would Settle It A documented count from Tang administrative or local records of deaths directly caused by the persecution, distinct from the well recorded laicization total, should one ever surface in the surviving archive.

Expertise Needed Tang dynasty history; Chinese Buddhist history

Question posed in Ennin's Diary: The Record of a Pilgrimage to China in Search of the Law, Ennin, translated and annotated by Edwin O. Reischauer.

Open The 1999 Ban and Crackdown on Falun Gong

Why It Is Open Detention, forced labor camp sentences and reports of torture and deaths in custody are well documented since the 1999 ban, but advocacy organizations and the Chinese government publish estimates that diverge by orders of magnitude, and neither is independently verified nor cross-checked against detention records outside state control.

What Would Settle It Independent access to Chinese detention, labor camp and mortality records, or a systematic international investigation with verified access to prison and camp registries from the relevant decades.

Expertise Needed Human rights documentation

Question posed in Falun Gong and the Future of China, David Ownby.

Open The Persecution of Ahmadis in Pakistan

Why It Is Open Individual killings and mob attacks against Pakistan's Ahmadi community are documented incident by incident since the 1974 constitutional amendment and the 1984 Ordinance XX, but no independent body has compiled a cumulative total across the full decades-long campaign of legal restriction and violence.

What Would Settle It A systematic count from an independent human rights body, cross-checked against Ahmadiyya community records and Pakistani state records, covering the full period since 1974.

Expertise Needed Human rights documentation

Question posed in Ordinance XX of 1984 (Pakistan), Government of Pakistan.