Open Questions

Open The Alhambra Decree

Why It Is Open The decree of 31 March 1492 ordered a permanent exclusion, and no repealing act is catalogued in this atlas. That a formal revocation took place in the twentieth century is very widely repeated in general accounts, and none of them that the atlas has been able to check cites the repealing instrument. Spain has acted concretely to reverse the decree's effects, most recently through Ley 12/2015, which offered Spanish nationality to Sephardim of Spanish origin and frames itself in its preamble as a redress of the expulsion, but that law does not purport to repeal the decree and does not refer to any earlier act that did.

What Would Settle It A citation to the Boletin Oficial del Estado, or to a scholarly account working from it, identifying the repealing instrument, its date and its scope. A negative finding would be equally useful: if the decree was left standing and simply became inoperative, that is a fact about how spent instruments die and belongs in the record.

Expertise Needed Spanish legal history; Sephardic studies; archival research in the Boletin Oficial del Estado

Question posed in Ley 12/2015, de 24 de junio, en materia de concesion de la nacionalidad espanola a los sefardies originarios de Espana, Cortes Generales de Espana.

Open The Fatwa Against Salman Rushdie

Why It Is Open The Iranian government stated in September 1998 that it had no intention of threatening the author's life and would not encourage anyone to do so. It did not describe that as a revocation. Iranian clerical bodies and the foundation that offered a reward have held that a ruling of this kind cannot be withdrawn after the death of the jurist who issued it, and the reward has been publicly reaffirmed since. The two positions are held by different institutions in the same state and neither has been withdrawn.

What Would Settle It A published juristic analysis, from within the school concerned, of whether a ruling of this kind survives its issuer and what act would be required to end it. A clear statement from the authority claiming successor jurisdiction would settle the practical half.

Expertise Needed Islamic jurisprudence, Twelver Shia; contemporary Iranian legal and political history

Question posed in From Fatwa to Jihad: The Rushdie Affair and Its Legacy, Kenan Malik.

Open The Herem on Baruch Spinoza

Why It Is Open The writ was entered in the minute book of the Talmud Torah congregation of Amsterdam and no act rescinding it has been catalogued here. The ban was of a kind that could be lifted on submission, and Spinoza never submitted. Proposals to lift it have been raised publicly in modern times, and the atlas has not verified a decision in either direction, nor identified who would have the standing to make one now.

What Would Settle It The minute books of the Amsterdam Portuguese Jewish congregation for any later entry on the case, or a statement from the congregation or its rabbinate. A finding that no such act exists is equally useful and would close the question.

Expertise Needed Early modern Jewish history; Dutch archival research; halakhic scholarship on the law of the ban

Question posed in Spinoza: A Life, Steven Nadler.

Open The Eight Garudhammas

Why It Is Open Several of the eight presuppose an order of nuns that already exists and has its own procedure, which they cannot have had at the moment of foundation. The sixth requires ordination from both communities, which is impossible for the first generation and is contradicted within the same collections. Six of the eight appear elsewhere in the discipline as ordinary rules, each with its own account of the incident that occasioned it. The Pali, Chinese and Tibetan recensions differ in wording and in order. Tradition places the rules at the founding of the bhikkhuni order during the Buddha's own ministry, but the Buddha's own dates are themselves unsettled and no source assigns the rules a specific year within it.

What Would Settle It Comparative work across all surviving recensions of the foundation account, including those preserved only in Chinese and Tibetan translation, with attention to which items are stable across lineages that separated early. Bhikkhu Analayo and Ute Husken have carried this a long way and the field has not converged. Independently, a firmer scholarly resolution of the Buddha's own chronology, or textual evidence dating the rules apart from the ordination narrative that carries them, would settle the date even where the recension question remains open.

Expertise Needed Buddhist studies; Pali, Chinese and Tibetan vinaya philology

Question posed in The Foundation History of the Nuns' Order, Bhikkhu Analayo.

Open Younger Futhark

Why It Is Open The atlas holds three Aett rows and all three are Elder Futhark. The division of the sixteen rune Younger Futhark into three families is structurally real: cipher rune inscriptions encode a rune as a family number plus a position within that family, which cannot work without an agreed division of the row. The live rune ordering here fits the partition usually reported, six, five and five, because Hagall stands at position 7 and Tyr at position 12, exactly where the second and third families would begin. The naming is what could not be established. A pass on 2026-07-27 found only popular and unsourced material, which does not agree with itself: the same three names are given over groups of eight, four and four, of six, six and four, of six, five and five, and of eight, eight and eight, and none of it carried a locator that could be checked. Deriving the rows from the rune ordering alone was refused as inference presented as attestation, so nothing was seeded.

What Would Settle It A reading of the standard runological literature on cryptic or cipher runes, for example Michael Barnes, Runes: A Handbook, 2012, or Klaus Duwel, Runenkunde, 2008, both already held as sources here, settling two things. First, whether the medieval evidence for the ordering of the families in cipher runes, which counts them in reverse so that the Tyr family is numbered first, is reported with family names attached or only with numbers. Second, whether the names Freyr, Hagall and Tyr for the Younger Futhark families occur in any Old Norse or Icelandic manuscript witness, or whether they enter print only in the modern revival, applied backwards from the Elder Futhark. A dated witness naming any one of the three would settle it and the rows could be seeded citing it. A demonstration that none exists would settle it the other way, and the division would stay a structural fact about cipher runes rather than three named entities.

Expertise Needed Runology; Old Norse philology; palaeography of Icelandic runic manuscripts

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

Open Ranjana

Why It Is Open Ranjana is unencoded, so there is no character standard to settle the inventory. The one openly licensed Ranjana typeface, Nithya Ranjana, ships two builds: the Devanagari-mapped build has no way to reach these six, because Devanagari has no letters for them, while the Newa-mapped build carries a separate outline for each, since the Newa block encodes them as letters of Prachalit. The font therefore draws six shapes whose status in Ranjana's own tradition this run could not establish, so the 47 letters seeded here are the vowels and consonants both builds agree on.

What Would Settle It A reading of Newar alphabet charts and primers that teach Ranjana in the Kathmandu Valley, or of the Ranjana Unicode encoding proposals submitted to the Unicode Technical Committee, either of which would state whether the six are counted as letters. If they are, they belong in the block at ids 5247 to 5252.

Expertise Needed Newar palaeography; South Asian script encoding

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

Open Tibetan

Why It Is Open The script is plainly Brahmi-derived, but the candidates within that family are several and the letter forms have been argued both towards Gupta Brahmi transmitted through the Indian northwest and towards the scripts of Khotan and the Central Asian oasis towns. The traditional answer, a single minister trained in India, is first recorded four hundred years after the fact and cannot be tested against any imperial-period source.

What Would Settle It Dated inscriptions or manuscripts from the first century of Tibetan writing, compared letter by letter against securely dated Indic and Central Asian exemplars of the same decades. A palaeographic study of the earliest Tibetan hands against the Khotanese and northwest Indian corpora would narrow the model even if it never names a designer.

Expertise Needed Palaeography of the Brahmi-derived scripts, Old Tibetan philology, and Central Asian manuscript studies

Question posed in Tibet: A History, Sam van Schaik.

Open Theban

Why It Is Open The whole case for a medieval Theban script is one sentence in the Polygraphia, and that sentence has been tested. The passage Trithemius cites is not in the works of Pietro d'Abano, and the one manuscript of the Sworn Book of Honorius that carries the alphabet says it took the characters from Agrippa, who was Trithemius's own pupil, so the script travels outward from 1518 rather than into it. What that leaves is an absence: nobody has named who cut the letters, and nobody argues for a rival origin, so this is a gap in the record rather than a dispute between camps. It is one question about one script, which is why it is asked here once rather than twenty six times over the letters.

What Would Settle It A witness to the letterforms from before 1518, in the Solomonic, ars notoria or alchemical manuscript traditions, or a systematic survey of those traditions returning nothing, which would be a real answer and not a failure. Failing either, work on Trithemius's own papers establishing whether he devised the script himself.

Expertise Needed History of Renaissance occultism; codicology of late medieval Latin magical manuscripts; history of cryptography

Question posed in The Sworn Book of Honorius (Liber Iuratus Honorii), Joseph H. Peterson's edition, Honorius of Thebes; Joseph H. Peterson (ed. and trans.).

Open Gurmukhi

Why It Is Open Sikh tradition credits Guru Angad with the script, while historians of Indic writing hold that the letterforms were already in mercantile use in the Landa hands. Both accounts are argued from the same thin evidence, and the atlas records the disagreement rather than settling it. What neither account establishes for this pass is whether the specific ordering of the thirty-five, including the placement of Sassa and Haha ahead of the five series, predates the Gurus or was fixed by them.

What Would Settle It Dated Landa or proto-Gurmukhi material with an explicit letter sequence, whether a scribal exercise, an account book heading or an inscription, from before the middle of the sixteenth century. A published palaeographic study of the ordering itself, as distinct from the letterforms, would also close it.

Expertise Needed Indic palaeography and the history of writing in the Punjab

Question posed in The World's Writing Systems, Peter T. Daniels and William Bright (eds.).

Open Epistle to Diognetus

Why It Is Open No ancient writer names or quotes the letter before its single surviving manuscript resurfaces in the thirteenth century, and the letter itself names no author. Its polished rhetorical style differs from the rest of the apostolic fathers collection it is conventionally grouped with, and proposed authors and dates spanning the second and third centuries all rest on style and apparent theological concern rather than direct evidence.

What Would Settle It An independent ancient citation or manuscript witness naming the author or firmly dating the text would settle this; absent that, a scholarly consensus reconciling its style and content with a known apologetic writer's other work would narrow the range.

Expertise Needed Patristics and early Christian textual studies

Question posed in The Apostolic Fathers: Greek Texts and English Translations (Michael W. Holmes), Michael W. Holmes, editor and translator.

Open Arda Viraf Nameh (Book of Arda Viraf)

Why It Is Open The text is framed as a first-person report of Viraf's own journey rather than a work with a credited literary author, and no compiler is named in the surviving manuscript tradition, which itself postdates the narrative's dramatic setting by an uncertain span.

What Would Settle It An independent contemporary or near-contemporary Sasanian or early Islamic-era reference to the text or its compiler would help settle authorship; a philological study distinguishing linguistic strata within the surviving Pahlavi could help separate earlier from later material.

Expertise Needed Iranian philology and Zoroastrian textual studies

Question posed in The Book of Arda Viraf (Martin Haug and E.W. West), Martin Haug and E.W. West, translators, with Dastur Hoshangji Jamaspji Asa.

Open Purvas

Why It Is Open The Purvas do not survive in any form. What is known of them comes entirely from later Jain canonical descriptions of their existence and content, not from the texts themselves, and no source outside the Jain tradition independently confirms either their content or that they trace to Mahavira's own teaching.

What Would Settle It The discovery of a surviving Purva manuscript, or an independent near-contemporary reference describing their actual content, would let the tradition's account of their origin be checked against something other than later restatement of the same tradition.

Expertise Needed Jain textual history and Indology

Question posed in The Jaina Path of Purification, Padmanabh S. Jaini.

Open I Ching

Why It Is Open Every commentary batch in this workstream carries a header naming James Legge 1882 as its source and stating that Wilhelm and Baynes was not used. The batch that wrote the first sentence of all 384 line descriptions carries no header and names no translator, so the provenance of that layer is genuinely undeclared. The vocabulary is mixed rather than uniform: the descriptions read goat and hedge at King Wen 34, ridgepole at King Wen 28, and cords and ropes at King Wen 29, all of which belong to the Wilhelm and Baynes English, while the articles written over them read ram, fence and beam, which belong to Legge. Recording either translation as the source of the description layer would be an assertion nobody has tested.

What Would Settle It A line by line collation of the 384 descriptions against Legge, The Sacred Books of the East volume XVI (1882), and against the Wilhelm and Baynes Bollingen English (1950), beginning with hexagrams 28, 29 and 34, where the two translations diverge on a single concrete noun and the divergence is already visible in the data. The collation would also have to say whether any description is close enough to the 1950 English to raise a rights question.

Expertise Needed Sinology, specifically Yijing translation history, together with a copyright reading on the Wilhelm and Baynes English of 1950.

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

Open The Quran

Why It Is Open Fourteen of the twenty-eight Arabic letters, exactly half the alphabet, appear disjoined at the opening of a number of suras. The classical commentary tradition records a wide range of proposals for what they do and returns no agreed answer, and one position long held within that tradition is that the meaning was not disclosed. Modern scholarship has added further proposals without producing a consensus either. This is not a case of two camps disagreeing; it is a case in which no reading has been established.

What Would Settle It Nothing in the manuscript record settles the meaning, and it may not be settleable. What would narrow it is evidence that bears on the openings as written objects rather than as a puzzle: systematic collation of the earliest codices for whether and how the letters are set off, and a distributional study relating the sets of letters to the suras that carry them.

Expertise Needed Quranic studies, Arabic philology and early Islamic manuscript palaeography

Question posed in The Study Quran: A New Translation and Commentary, Seyyed Hossein Nasr (editor-in-chief).

Open Ekpe

Why It Is Open Ekpe was already a mature, fully graded institution by the time the earliest outside observers described it, so their accounts date contact rather than founding, and Cross River oral tradition does not preserve a single founder or a securely countable founding year.

What Would Settle It Comparative Ejagham and Efik oral-tradition fieldwork or an archaeological or documentary find independently datable to a period before the earliest colonial-era accounts, tying an early stage of Ekpe's grade structure to a place and an approximate century.

Expertise Needed West African historical anthropology and oral tradition studies

Question posed in Voice of the Leopard: African Secret Societies and Cuba, Ivor L. Miller.

Open Ogboni

Why It Is Open Ogboni is described in the scholarship as having developed alongside Oyo's own political institutions rather than being founded by a named person at a datable moment, and no Yoruba historical or oral source names a founder.

What Would Settle It Oyo court-history research or archaeology tying Ogboni's earth-veneration role and its check on royal power to an identifiable stage of Oyo's own political consolidation.

Expertise Needed Yoruba political history and religious anthropology

Question posed in The Yoruba Ogboni Cult in Oyo, Peter Morton-Williams.

Open Sarmoung Brotherhood

Why It Is Open The Sarmoung Brotherhood is known only through Gurdjieff's own narrative in Meetings with Remarkable Men and the accounts of those who took the story from him. No traveller, ethnographer or historian outside that circle has independently located or documented such a body.

What Would Settle It An independent nineteenth or early twentieth century record, travel account or local Central Asian source naming a body matching Gurdjieff's description, unconnected to Gurdjieff's own circle.

Expertise Needed Central Asian history and the history of esoteric movements

Question posed in The Harmonious Circle: The Lives and Work of G. I. Gurdjieff, P. D. Ouspensky, and Their Followers, James Webb.

Open Sarmoung Brotherhood

Why It Is Open The whole account descends from Gurdjieff's own writing and from what he told pupils. The Armenian manuscript he names has not been produced or identified, no location has been established, and no independent traveller, official or scholarly record of such a body has been found for a region that was heavily travelled and reported on. Positions divide between a traceable synthesis of available currents, a real but unnamed Sufi lineage, and a deliberate literary device, and no evidence has been produced for any of the three.

What Would Settle It Identification of the Armenian source named in the account, or of any manuscript using the name; archival work in Russian, Ottoman and British records of Central Asian travel for the relevant years; and comparative study of the movements against documented Sufi and Central Asian practice by scholars with access to both.

Expertise Needed History of Central Asian Sufism; Armenian manuscript studies; the academic study of Western esotericism

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

Open Aurum Solis

Why It Is Open The 1897 founding and both founders' names rest on the order's own account and on nothing else that has been produced. No lodge record, no correspondence and no third party notice of either name from the period has come to light, and no scholar has argued the point either way, so this is an absence rather than a disagreement.

What Would Settle It An archival search for the two names in English civil registration, probate and census returns for the period, together with a search of the surviving papers and membership rolls of the English occult lodges of the 1890s, and, if the order will open them, its own pre-1971 papers. Any one of the three would move the question.

Expertise Needed Archival history; history of Western esotericism

Question posed in Encyclopedia of American Religions, J. Gordon Melton.

Open Sarajevo Haggadah

Why It Is Open The manuscript's marginal notes place it in Italy by the sixteenth century, and it was purchased by the National Museum of Bosnia and Herzegovina in Sarajevo in 1894, but no source consulted names an owner, a sale or a route connecting the two. Three centuries of the manuscript's history are undocumented.

What Would Settle It An archival record, an auction or sale document, an ownership mark, or a scholarly study of the manuscript's codicology that names an intervening owner or location between its sixteenth century appearance in Italy and its 1894 purchase in Sarajevo.

Expertise Needed Manuscript provenance research, Sephardic Jewish history

Question posed in National Museum of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Sarajevo Haggadah Catalogue Record, National Museum of Bosnia and Herzegovina.