Open Questions

Open Ivy (Gort)

Why It Is Open Graves built the thirteen sign sequence in The White Goddess, 1948, by pairing his own reading of the Beth-Luis-Nion tree names to a thirteen month lunar calendar he reconstructed himself. That the wider tree calendar is his modern invention rather than an attested ancient system is not in dispute, and the tree names match because he took them from Ogham. What nobody has examined is the step after that: whether placing a given tree at a given calendar position reflects anything in the surviving Ogham material, or only his argument. No Celtic studies scholar has tested his month by month assignments either way, which is why this is an unfilled gap rather than a disagreement between camps. One question covers all thirteen signs, because the pairing is one act rather than thirteen.

What Would Settle It A philological comparison of Graves's month-by-month tree assignments against the Ogham letter-name glosses preserved in the Auraicept na nEces and the Briatharogam tracts, by a scholar of medieval Irish, to establish whether any assignment beyond the shared name is supportable.

Expertise Needed Celtic studies, medieval Irish philology

Question posed in A Guide to Ogam, Damian McManus.

Open Reed (Ngetal)

Why It Is Open Graves built the thirteen sign sequence in The White Goddess, 1948, by pairing his own reading of the Beth-Luis-Nion tree names to a thirteen month lunar calendar he reconstructed himself. That the wider tree calendar is his modern invention rather than an attested ancient system is not in dispute, and the tree names match because he took them from Ogham. What nobody has examined is the step after that: whether placing a given tree at a given calendar position reflects anything in the surviving Ogham material, or only his argument. No Celtic studies scholar has tested his month by month assignments either way, which is why this is an unfilled gap rather than a disagreement between camps. One question covers all thirteen signs, because the pairing is one act rather than thirteen.

What Would Settle It A philological comparison of Graves's month-by-month tree assignments against the Ogham letter-name glosses preserved in the Auraicept na nEces and the Briatharogam tracts, by a scholar of medieval Irish, to establish whether any assignment beyond the shared name is supportable.

Expertise Needed Celtic studies, medieval Irish philology

Question posed in A Guide to Ogam, Damian McManus.

Open Elder (Ruis)

Why It Is Open Graves built the thirteen sign sequence in The White Goddess, 1948, by pairing his own reading of the Beth-Luis-Nion tree names to a thirteen month lunar calendar he reconstructed himself. That the wider tree calendar is his modern invention rather than an attested ancient system is not in dispute, and the tree names match because he took them from Ogham. What nobody has examined is the step after that: whether placing a given tree at a given calendar position reflects anything in the surviving Ogham material, or only his argument. No Celtic studies scholar has tested his month by month assignments either way, which is why this is an unfilled gap rather than a disagreement between camps. One question covers all thirteen signs, because the pairing is one act rather than thirteen.

What Would Settle It A philological comparison of Graves's month-by-month tree assignments against the Ogham letter-name glosses preserved in the Auraicept na nEces and the Briatharogam tracts, by a scholar of medieval Irish, to establish whether any assignment beyond the shared name is supportable.

Expertise Needed Celtic studies, medieval Irish philology

Question posed in A Guide to Ogam, Damian McManus.

Open The Words of Institution

Why It Is Open The received East Syriac text has no institution narrative, and the Holy See judged eucharists celebrated with it valid in 2001 on the ground that the words are present in the prayer in a dispersed form. Whether the narrative was omitted, was lost in transmission, or was never there is argued from the manuscript tradition and from the structure of the prayer, and this run could not establish which reading holds the field.

What Would Settle It A study of the earliest East Syriac manuscript witnesses and their variants, set against the structure of the related Syriac anaphoras, together with the responses published by liturgical scholars to the 2001 guidelines.

Expertise Needed Liturgical history; Syriac manuscript studies

Question posed in Divinity Atlas Open Questions Register, First Edition.

Open Korban (The Israelite Offering)

Why It Is Open The Mishnah was redacted around 200 CE, more than a century after the Temple was destroyed, and it is the only detailed source for most of the procedure. Josephus, Philo and the Qumran texts corroborate the institutions but very little of the fine detail, and the two bodies of evidence were produced for different purposes.

What Would Settle It A systematic detail-by-detail comparison of Mishnaic procedure against the pre-70 evidence, distinguishing points corroborated by Josephus, Philo, Qumran and the surviving epigraphy from points attested only in the Mishnah, would show where the account is anchored and where it is not. Fresh documentary or epigraphic material from the Temple period would move individual points.

Expertise Needed Rabbinics, Second Temple history, epigraphy

Question posed in From the Maccabees to the Mishnah, Shaye J. D. Cohen.

Open Parah Adumah (The Red Heifer)

Why It Is Open Mishnah tractate Parah is the only source that supplies a count, and it records a dispute over the total rather than a settled figure. No independent documentary, epigraphic or archaeological attestation of any single performance has been identified, so there is nothing outside that one list against which the number can be checked. Nobody holds a defended position on the true count; the record is simply absent.

What Would Settle It An independent Second Temple period attestation would settle at least one performance: an ostracon, papyrus or inscription referring to the preparation of the ashes or to the water of lustration, or a securely dated installation on the Mount of Olives identifiable with the rite. Systematic re-reading of the Judaean desert documentary material for purity-water vocabulary is the cheapest place to look.

Expertise Needed Second Temple epigraphy and papyrology, archaeology of Roman Judaea

Question posed in The Mishnah, Anonymous (rabbinic compilers), Parah.

Open Extispicy and Haruspicy

Why It Is Open No book of the Etruscan discipline survives in any language. The Piacenza liver assigns divine names to regions of the organ and says nothing about method, and the Roman authors who describe haruspicy were writing from outside the tradition, often centuries later, and were not attempting to transmit a procedure. Nobody has proposed and defended a reconstruction of the method, so what is missing is evidence rather than agreement.

What Would Settle It An Etruscan haruspical text of any length would settle it, and a bilingual would settle it decisively. Failing that, a systematic comparison of the Piacenza liver against the far better documented Mesopotamian liver models and their accompanying omen compendia would at least establish whether the two systems share a method, which would constrain the possibilities.

Expertise Needed Etruscology, Etruscan epigraphy, Assyriology

Question posed in The Religion of the Etruscans, Nancy Thomson de Grummond and Erika Simon (eds.).

Open The Words of Institution

Why It Is Open A group of early witnesses gives a shorter text of Luke 22 that stops after the first mention of the cup, and the longer text, printed in most modern critical editions, gives the bread and a second cup. The two readings shape the passage differently and the argument has run for more than a century. This run recorded the dispute on this page but did not establish where the weight of current textual scholarship sits.

What Would Settle It A current survey of the manuscript evidence and of the argument over the Western non-interpolations, with the editorial reasoning of the major critical editions set side by side.

Expertise Needed New Testament textual criticism

Question posed in Divinity Atlas Open Questions Register, First Edition.

Open Chatat (The Purification Offering)

Why It Is Open The two readings derive the noun from different senses of the same verb stem, and the biblical text supports each in different passages. The offering is required where no wrong has been done, which favours the purification reading, but the same chapters use the ordinary language of forgiveness, which does not.

What Would Settle It This is a question of interpretation rather than of missing evidence, and it will not be closed by a discovery. What would advance it is a full account of the class that explains the childbirth and discharge cases and the forgiveness formulae together, rather than treating either group as residual.

Expertise Needed Hebrew Bible philology, Priestly source criticism

Question posed in Leviticus 1-16: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary, Jacob Milgrom.

Open The Scapegoat Rite of Yom Kippur

Why It Is Open Mishnah tractate Yoma names a site east of Jerusalem and describes a cliff, a measured route and a series of stations along it, but the name is spelled differently across the manuscript traditions and no identification on the ground has been established. No candidate site has a scholarly case mounted for it, so this is an unfilled gap rather than a contested identification.

What Would Settle It A survey along the plausible routes east of Jerusalem for a cliff matching the described distance, together with the remains of the staged booths, could produce a candidate. A firmer reading of the place name from the better manuscript traditions would narrow the search before any fieldwork.

Expertise Needed Historical geography of Judaea, rabbinic manuscript studies, field archaeology

Question posed in The Mishnah, Anonymous (rabbinic compilers), Yoma.

Open Thysia (Greek Animal Sacrifice)

Why It Is Open Three positions are held simultaneously by serious scholars and none has displaced the others: the rite as the preserved structure of a hunting kill with its attendant guilt, the rite as a system of cooking and distribution that fixes the human place between gods and beasts, and a critique arguing that the tidy opposition between sacrifice eaten and sacrifice burned entire is a modern schematisation the evidence of hero cult does not support.

What Would Settle It This is not a question a single find will close. What moves it is the accumulation of excavated faunal assemblages from sanctuary deposits, which record what was actually burned and what was butchered and eaten, tested against the literary schema rather than read through it.

Expertise Needed Greek religion, zooarchaeology of sanctuary deposits

Question posed in Miasma: Pollution and Purification in Early Greek Religion, Robert Parker.

Open Asham (The Reparation Offering)

Why It Is Open No ancient source states the distinction in terms that decide the cases where both appear. The reparation offering covers both sanctuary property and private fraud compounded by a false oath, and no single principle proposed so far accounts for that pairing without strain.

What Would Settle It A comparative study of reparation terminology in the wider ancient Near Eastern legal and cultic corpora, set against the Priestly cases, would test whether the pairing is a Priestly innovation or an inherited category.

Expertise Needed Hebrew Bible philology, comparative ancient Near Eastern law

Question posed in Leviticus 1-16: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary, Jacob Milgrom.

Open Tamid (The Daily Offering)

Why It Is Open The tractate narrates the daily service circumstantially, from the priests rising to the completion of the offering, and that circumstantiality is exactly what makes its status hard to judge: a literary reconstruction written to be persuasive would look the same. It was redacted long after the last offering was made, and no pre-70 source describes the sequence in comparable detail.

What Would Settle It A point-by-point comparison of the tractate against Josephus, Philo, the Temple Scroll and the Qumran calendrical material, separating items with independent support from items attested only there, would show how much of the sequence is anchored. Priestly course inscriptions and any further Temple-period administrative material would add anchor points.

Expertise Needed Rabbinics, Second Temple history, Dead Sea Scrolls studies

Question posed in From the Maccabees to the Mishnah, Shaye J. D. Cohen.

Open Soma Sacrifice

Why It Is Open The Rig Veda describes soma's habitat, preparation and effects, but the living tradition lost the plant before the late Vedic period, when the ritual texts already prescribe substitutes. Two centuries of proposals (ephedra, fly agaric, Syrian rue, and others, including Wasson's 1968 book-length fly agaric case) each fit some verses and fail others, and no candidate has won consensus.

What Would Settle It Archaeobotanical residue analysis from an early Vedic or BMAC-context ritual vessel with identifiable plant remains, or a decisive phytochemical match between the full Rigvedic description and a candidate species in its Indo-Iranian range.

Expertise Needed Archaeobotany and Vedic philology

Question posed in The Rigveda: The Earliest Religious Poetry of India, Stephanie W. Jamison and Joel P. Brereton, Introduction, on soma and its identification.

Open Senet

Why It Is Open No complete ancient rule text survives. Play is reconstructed from board layouts, marked squares and the partial instructions in late funerary compositions, and competing reconstructions disagree on movement and on how the marked squares functioned.

What Would Settle It A papyrus or ostracon setting out the rules of play in full, from a securely dated context, or a securely dated board with an inscribed sequence complete enough to fix movement independently of the later funerary texts.

Expertise Needed Egyptology; the archaeology of games

Question posed in In Search of the Meaning of Senet, in Archaeology 33, Peter A. Piccione.

Open Zi Wei Dou Shu

Why It Is Open The system is traditionally ascribed to the Daoist adept Chen Tuan, c. 871-989, but the attribution cannot be verified against any surviving text from his lifetime, and the earliest manuscripts describing the method postdate him by centuries.

What Would Settle It A textual historical study tracing the earliest surviving Zi Wei Dou Shu manuscripts and comparing their content and terminology against securely dated Chen Tuan texts.

Expertise Needed Sinology; history of Chinese astrology; textual criticism

Question posed in Chinese Mathematical Astrology: Reaching Out to the Stars, Ho Peng Yoke.

Open Dzogchen

Why It Is Open The Nyingma tradition attributes Dzogchen's transmission to Padmasambhava and Vimalamitra in the eighth century CE, but the earliest securely datable Dzogchen texts are placed later by scholars, and the surviving Dunhuang manuscripts leave the relationship between early Dzogchen and Chan Buddhist teaching in Tibet unresolved.

What Would Settle It Further codicological dating and textual comparison of the Dunhuang Dzogchen and Chan manuscripts against securely dated Chan sources, by scholars working directly with the manuscript corpus.

Expertise Needed Tibetology; Buddhist studies; manuscript studies

Question posed in Introduction to Tibetan Buddhism, John Powers.

Open Geomancy

Why It Is Open The same structure of sixteen four position figures appears across West Africa, Madagascar, North Africa and medieval Europe. Some scholars read the African systems as local developments of Islamic geomancy carried across the Sahara; others argue for substantially independent development. Neither position rests on datable evidence from the relevant period.

What Would Settle It Datable material evidence from before the earliest surviving testimony: excavated divining apparatus, or a dated text describing the practice, from either side of the Sahara. Comparative linguistic work on the figure names across the four traditions would also constrain the answer.

Expertise Needed History of religions; archaeology of West and North Africa; historical linguistics

Question posed in Ifa Divination: Communication between Gods and Men in West Africa, William Bascom.

Open Ifa Divination

Why It Is Open The sixteen are learned in an order treated as one of seniority, but published sequences do not agree in every particular, and agreement is weakest past the first few positions. Bascom treated the order of the figures as a subject needing its own study rather than a fact he could simply report.

What Would Settle It A systematic survey recording the ordering taught in a range of identified lineages and localities, with the informants and dates named, so that variation can be mapped rather than averaged.

Expertise Needed Ethnography of West African divination; Yoruba studies

Question posed in Ifa Divination: Communication between Gods and Men in West Africa, William Bascom.

Open Diloggun

Why It Is Open The two are the same oracle by descent, and most of the sixteen parent names carry across, but the earliest substantial documentation of Cuban practice dates from the twentieth century, long after the transatlantic crossing. Everything between is inferred from the state of the two traditions when they were finally recorded.

What Would Settle It Earlier documentary evidence of Cuban practice: colonial administrative or ecclesiastical records describing cowrie divination, or dated libretas from the nineteenth century with a secure provenance.

Expertise Needed History of Afro-Cuban religion; archival history of colonial Cuba

Question posed in Sixteen Cowries: Yoruba Divination from Africa to the New World, William Bascom.