Open Questions

Open Andrei Rublev

Why It Is Open Rublev enters the documentary record as an adult monk already at work in 1405; no earlier source records his birthplace or exact birth year.

What Would Settle It A monastic or chronicle record from before 1405 naming his origin, none of which has been identified.

Expertise Needed Byzantine and Russian art history, medieval Russian monastic records

Question posed in The Rublev Trinity: The Icon of the Trinity by the Monk-painter Andrei Rublev (Gabriel Bunge), Gabriel Bunge.

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 Axion Estin

Why It Is Open Athonite monastic tradition credits the text to a tenth century revelation to a monk at Karyes, but that account is devotional legend, not a documented event, and no independent manuscript or historical source establishes the hymns actual date or author.

What Would Settle It A dated manuscript witness to the text earlier than, or independent of, the Athonite legend, or a specialist study of Byzantine Marian hymnography that traces the hymns transmission history on textual rather than legendary grounds.

Expertise Needed Byzantine liturgical history; hymnography

Question posed in The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, 3rd revised edition, F. L. Cross and E. A. Livingstone (eds.).

Open The Affaire de Bizoton

Why It Is Open No trial transcript survives. The case is known only through accounts by foreign observers who had arrived already persuaded of the charge, above all Spenser St John, who published his twenty years afterwards and who recorded that the confessions had been beaten out of the accused. The court proceeded in French before Creole-speaking defendants, and the Haitian government, seeking diplomatic recognition, had an interest in a public conviction watched by European envoys. No scholar holds a reconstruction of the events, because there is nothing to reconstruct one from.

What Would Settle It Recovery of Haitian judicial or police records for 1864, whether in Port-au-Prince or in the French, British and American consular archives that received contemporary reports, together with a critical edition of the surviving foreign accounts collated against one another rather than read singly.

Expertise Needed Caribbean archival history and the history of criminal justice, with Haitian Creole and nineteenth-century French palaeography.

Question posed in Hayti, or the Black Republic, Spenser St John.

Open Dutty Boukman

Why It Is Open He is one of the most consequential individuals in Caribbean history and no document has been produced that establishes his origin. The suggestion of an anglophone Caribbean birth rests on a reading of his name and has never been tested against a record. Because he was enslaved, the paperwork that would ordinarily answer this, if it ever existed, was made by people with no interest in his identity.

What Would Settle It A plantation inventory, notarial act, baptismal entry or ship manifest naming him, from the archives of Saint-Domingue, Jamaica or the French colonial administration. Much of the relevant colonial notarial material survives in France and in Haiti and has not been searched systematically for this purpose.

Expertise Needed Caribbean archival history; Atlantic slave trade record linkage; onomastics

Question posed in Voodoo in Haiti, Alfred Metraux.

Open Coventina

Why It Is Open No literary source or inscription outside her own shrine explains what her name means or where it comes from. The name survives only as a religious dedication carved on Roman-period altars at one site, with no surrounding text to gloss it.

What Would Settle It A comparative Celtic and Brittonic etymological study of the name against known place and water-deity name elements, and continued epigraphic survey in case an uninscribed or fragmentary dedication elsewhere in Roman Britain or Gaul preserves a related or explanatory form.

Expertise Needed Celtic and Brittonic historical linguistics; Romano-British epigraphy

Question posed in A Dictionary of Celtic Mythology, James MacKillop.

Open Ahmad Yasavi

Why It Is Open No birth year is recorded anywhere, and the received death year rests on hagiographical sources written centuries after the life. Nobody argues for a particular birth year, because there is no evidence to argue from; the reference literature simply omits it.

What Would Settle It A twelfth or thirteenth century document, endowment record or inscription from Yasi, Sayram or Bukhara that names him with a date.

Expertise Needed Central Asian documentary history and Persian hagiography

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

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 Bogu Khagan

Why It Is Open What is documented is his lineage within the Yaghlakar clan, his accession in 759, and his role in suppressing the An Lushan rebellion and adopting Manichaeism; no Uyghur, Chinese or Sogdian source ties his birth to a specific place.

What Would Settle It A Uyghur, Chinese or Sogdian record naming a specific birth site, which none of the surviving sources on his reign supplies.

Expertise Needed Central Asian history; history of Manichaeism

Question posed in Encyclopedia of Mongolia and the Mongol Empire, Christopher P. Atwood.

Open Bilge Khagan

Why It Is Open The Orkhon inscriptions and Chinese Tang era records document his genealogy, birth name, year of birth and campaigns in detail, but no surviving text ties his birth to a place; a nomadic steppe khaganate kept no fixed birth records tied to a settlement.

What Would Settle It A steppe or Chinese record naming a specific birth site, which the Orkhon inscriptions and Tang annals alike do not supply.

Expertise Needed Central Asian history; Turkic epigraphy

Question posed in Orkhon inscriptions (the Kul Tigin and Bilge Khagan steles), Anonymous (Old Turkic royal inscription).

Open Assembly of the Taoist Deities (Yongle Palace)

Why It Is Open The mural's own inscription and every modern source consulted credit Ma Junxiang and his son Ma Qi as its painters "and others," but none names those others, states how many additional painters worked on it, or describes how a mural of roughly four hundred square meters completed within a single year was divided among a workshop team.

What Would Settle It A closer reading of the mural's own inscription text, temple donor or workshop records from the period, or a stylistic analysis distinguishing individual painting hands across different sections of the mural, any of which could identify the additional painters or at least establish how many there were.

Expertise Needed Chinese art history, Yuan dynasty epigraphy, workshop and guild studies

Question posed in Wikipedia, "Yongle Gong", Wikipedia contributors.

Open Leshan Giant Buddha

Why It Is Open No inscription, temple record or contemporary chronicle names the sculptor, master mason or workshop who carved the statue, even though the monk who conceived the project and the two officials who later funded its completion are all recorded by name.

What Would Settle It A Tang-period donative or masons' inscription naming a carving workshop, of a kind found at other major Tang Buddhist rock-carving sites but not yet identified at Leshan itself, or a documentary source from the Jiannan Xichuan administration not yet examined.

Expertise Needed Chinese Buddhist art history, Tang-period epigraphy

Question posed in Encyclopaedia Britannica (online academic reference), Encyclopaedia Britannica editors, s.v. "Leshan Giant Buddha", attribution gap.

Open Panthay Rebellion

Why It Is Open Yunnan's population fell steeply during the Panthay Rebellion, but that collapse combines the war's own combat and reprisal deaths with a major plague epidemic that swept the province in the same decades, and no modern historian has disaggregated a war caused figure from the rest.

What Would Settle It A modern demographic or historical study working through Yunnanese provincial and Qing administrative records to separate combat, reprisal and famine deaths tied directly to the fighting from the mortality caused by the era's plague epidemic.

Expertise Needed Chinese history; historical demography

Question posed in The Chinese Sultanate: Islam, Ethnicity, and the Panthay Rebellion in Southwest China, 1856-1873, David G. Atwill.

Open Lúcia dos Santos

Why It Is Open Her three biographical facts that depend on events after 2000, lifespan, manner of death and canonization, have not yet been recorded because the only Fatima sources this atlas holds are The Message of Fatima (2000) and the 2017 canonisation homily for her cousins. Neither can document a death in 2005 or a cause opened afterwards, and citing one of them anyway would be a fabricated citation. The facts are not disputed by anybody; they are simply not yet sourced. This is a sourcing gap, not a scholarly one.

What Would Settle It Any published record postdating February 2005: the Holy See's own announcement of her death, the Carmel of Coimbra's record, or the decrees of her cause as published in the Acta Apostolicae Sedis. Adding one such source to the catalogue would let all three facts be recorded and this question closed.

Expertise Needed Church history; Catholic canon law

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

Open Picatrix (Ghayat al-Hakim)

Why It Is Open The Picatrix has long circulated under the name of Maslama al-Majriti, the Andalusi mathematician and astronomer who died in the early eleventh century. The ascription has been challenged in favour of Maslama ibn Qasim al-Qurtubi, a different Andalusi scholar of overlapping name and period with a documented interest in the occult sciences. The atlas records the attribution as it circulates and does not treat either identification as settled.

What Would Settle It A comparative study of the Arabic Ghayat against the securely attributed works of each candidate, on vocabulary, sources cited and technical practice, or a manuscript colophon earlier than the ones currently known.

Expertise Needed Classical Arabic philology and the history of science in al-Andalus.

Question posed in Picatrix: A Medieval Treatise on Astral Magic, Dan Attrell and David Porreca (trans.).

Open The Eleusinian Mysteries

Why It Is Open The prohibition on disclosure held for the whole life of the cult and no initiate left an account in any surviving text. Ancient writers describe the effect of the rite rather than its content. The only reports that claim to give content are by Christian polemicists writing centuries later from outside the cult, with an interest in making it appear either trivial or obscene, and there is nothing independent against which to test them. Excavation gives the hall and the small closed structure at its centre and nothing of what was done there.

What Would Settle It An ancient text by an initiate, or a document from the sanctuary's own administration describing the conduct of the rite, recovered by excavation at Eleusis or identified in a papyrus collection. Inscriptions from the sanctuary already record its finances and its officials, so a procedural record is not an impossible find.

Expertise Needed Classical archaeology, Greek epigraphy, papyrology

Question posed in Greek Religion, Walter Burkert.

Open Dragon's Blood

Why It Is Open Pliny and other classical writers use cinnabaris for both the red resin later called dragon's blood and, separately, the mineral cinnabar, mercury sulfide, and scholars disagree over which passages refer to which substance.

What Would Settle It A study disentangling the classical vocabulary for red resins and red minerals, establishing which passages securely name the Socotran dragon tree resin.

Expertise Needed Classical philology, history of pharmacology

Question posed in Encyclopedia of Religion, Mircea Eliade (ed.); Lindsay Jones (ed., 2nd ed.).

Open Parmenides

Why It Is Open No ancient source records when Parmenides died. His birth is dated from the dramatic setting of Plato's dialogue named for him, which implies old age around 450 BCE, but nothing marks the end of his life.

What Would Settle It A datable ancient testimony naming when Parmenides died, independent of the dramatic framing of Plato's dialogue.

Expertise Needed Classical philology, history of pre-Socratic philosophy

Question posed in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Edward N. Zalta and Uri Nodelman (eds.).

Open Ergot

Why It Is Open Proposed by Wasson, Hofmann and Ruck in 1978. It would explain how an experience initiates consistently described as overwhelming could be produced reliably for thousands of people on a schedule. But no ancient source describes anything of the kind, the water extraction needed to separate soluble from toxic alkaloids is delicate, and the argument reasons backwards from the reported effect to a cause that would account for it.

What Would Settle It Residue analysis of vessels securely associated with the Eleusinian rite, or a text that describes the preparation. Absent either, the question may be permanently undecidable, since the Mysteries were kept for roughly two thousand years and the secret held.

Expertise Needed Classics, ancient history, archaeochemistry, mycology

Question posed in The Road to Eleusis: Unveiling the Secret of the Mysteries, R. Gordon Wasson, Albert Hofmann and Carl A. P. Ruck.

Open The Ergot Hypothesis of the Eleusinian Kykeon

Why It Is Open The proposal was made in 1978 and has been argued over since without anything being settled, because the argument runs from the reported effect back to a cause that would produce it rather than from evidence of the cause. Nothing ancient describes the drink as intoxicating, and the delicate preparation the chemistry requires is nowhere recorded. The initiates kept the oath for roughly two thousand years, so the documentary route may simply be closed.

What Would Settle It Residue analysis for ergot alkaloids on a vessel securely associated with the rite, from the sanctuary itself rather than from the wider site. Failing that, a text describing the preparation. If neither is ever available the honest answer is that the question is undecidable, and saying so is a real finding rather than a failure.

Expertise Needed Classics; ancient history; archaeochemistry; mycology

Question posed in The Road to Eleusis: Unveiling the Secret of the Mysteries, R. Gordon Wasson, Albert Hofmann and Carl A. P. Ruck.