Open Questions

Open Tituba

Why It Is Open The 1692 court papers record her enslaved status and her testimony and nothing about her birth, her passage or her later life. Elaine Breslaw's reconstruction of an Arawak origin by way of Barbados works from indirect records and is explicitly circumstantial; other readings of the same material remain open, and the later life is a blank rather than a dispute.

What Would Settle It Documentary evidence tying her to a named vessel, cargo manifest, inventory, parish register or estate record, in Barbados, Massachusetts or elsewhere. A subsequent record of her under any name after 1693 would answer the second half.

Expertise Needed Colonial American and Caribbean archival history; the history of slavery and of Atlantic shipping records

Question posed in Tituba, Reluctant Witch of Salem: Devilish Indians and Puritan Fantasies, Elaine G. Breslaw, Breslaw, Tituba, Reluctant Witch of Salem.

Open The Origin of Tituba of Salem Village

Why It Is Open The word carried a wide and shifting range in a Massachusetts court of the period, and the clerks who used it were not making an ethnographic determination. The reconstruction of an Arawak origin by way of Barbados rests on that word plus indirect household and shipping records, and no direct evidence of her birth or passage has been found.

What Would Settle It A study of how colonial Massachusetts clerks used the term across a large corpus of records in the same decades, set against any direct documentary trace of her arrival.

Expertise Needed Colonial American archival history; historical linguistics of legal and administrative usage

Question posed in Tituba, Reluctant Witch of Salem: Devilish Indians and Puritan Fantasies, Elaine G. Breslaw, Breslaw, Tituba, Reluctant Witch of Salem.

Open Shagai

Why It Is Open The correspondence is exact rather than approximate: the same bone, the same four landing faces, cast in the same small numbers, read for answers and played with for entertainment in both regions. It is also exactly what one would expect to arise independently anywhere sheep are kept, since the bone is nearly cubical, resists rolling and is produced free in quantity. The objects themselves cannot distinguish the two explanations.

What Would Settle It Comparative work at the level of the cultural layer rather than the object: which faces are assigned which values, what combinations are named, and how the reading is structured. Those choices are cultural and could carry a transmission signal that the anatomy cannot. Dated archaeological assemblages showing marked or modified bones along a plausible corridor would also bear on it.

Expertise Needed Comparative archaeology of divination, and Eurasian material culture studies

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

Open Pine

Why It Is Open Pine is native and ritually used across multiple, unrelated regions and periods, so no single earliest attestation can honestly be named without first specifying which tradition's use of pine as incense is being dated.

What Would Settle It A comparative study establishing the earliest securely dated attestation of pine resin or needles burned as incense in a specific named tradition.

Expertise Needed Comparative religion, archaeobotany

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

Open Saint

Why It Is Open The comparative literature has not settled this. Using one tradition's word for the others carries with it a juridical, posthumous and universal notion of holiness that the wali, the tzadik, the sant and the arhat do not each share, and specialists in those fields regularly object to the translation. There is no agreed replacement term.

What Would Settle It A sustained comparative study working from each tradition's own vocabulary outward rather than from the English word inward, and testing whether any set of features is genuinely shared across them.

Expertise Needed Comparative religion; religious studies

Question posed in The Oxford Dictionary of World Religions, John Bowker (ed.), s.v. Saint.

Open Nanak Shah Fakir (2015)

Why It Is Open In April 2018 the Akal Takht declared the film banned and excommunicated producer Harinder Singh Sikka for proceeding with its re-release regardless. Every source consulted for this entry stops there: none records whether the ban or the excommunication were later upheld, formally lifted, or quietly left unaddressed by Sikh religious authority.

What Would Settle It A later Akal Takht or SGPC statement, resolution or press record addressing either the ban or Sikka's excommunication after April 2018, or a current interview or public record confirming Sikka's present standing within the Sikh religious community.

Expertise Needed Contemporary Sikh institutional history, South Asian religion journalism

Question posed in SBS Punjabi, "Controversial Movie 'Nanak Shah Fakir' to Be Released Despite Protests," 2018, Paramjit Singh Sona.

Open Janja ϫ

Why It Is Open Both were taken from Demotic to write affricates that Greek could not, and both carry no numeral value, which is settled. Their phonetic values are not. Reconstructions differ between scholars and between the Coptic dialects, and the evidence is indirect, resting on transcriptions of Coptic words into other scripts and on comparison with earlier stages of Egyptian.

What Would Settle It A systematic collection of Coptic words transcribed into Greek and into Arabic, set against the dialect distribution of the two letters and against the Demotic signs they descend from. Camps exist on this question, so what would resolve it is evidence that discriminates between them rather than a further reading of the same material.

Expertise Needed Coptic phonology and Egyptian historical linguistics

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

Open Khai ϧ

Why It Is Open Six of the seven Egyptian additions to the Coptic alphabet are taken from Demotic and their sources are not in dispute. Khai is the exception. It appears in Bohairic and not in Sahidic, which has thirty-one letters where Bohairic has thirty-two, and accounts of where its shape came from differ. This atlas states the letter, its dialect distribution and its sound, and does not state a derivation.

What Would Settle It Forms collected from dated Old Coptic and early Bohairic manuscripts and compared against the Demotic sign repertoire, with the dialect distribution of the letter mapped alongside. A published palaeographic study of that comparison would settle it or would establish that the evidence does not.

Expertise Needed Coptology and Egyptian palaeography

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

Open Upsilon ⲩ

Why It Is Open Coptic renamed several of the Greek letters, and this atlas uses the Coptic names where they are settled: ei for epsilon, laula for lambda, ou for omicron, semma for sigma. For upsilon the authorities disagree. Scholarly grammars of the Sahidic dialect record one Coptic form, alphabet charts in ordinary Coptic Orthodox use commonly print another, and the run that seeded these rows could not establish which had the better claim without asserting something it had not checked. The Greek name is used in the meantime as a neutral label.

What Would Settle It A survey of the letter names given in the principal Coptic grammars alongside the names taught in Coptic Orthodox church schools in Egypt and the diaspora, distinguishing the scholarly Sahidic tradition from living Bohairic practice, and saying which name belongs to which tradition rather than choosing one for both.

Expertise Needed Coptology; Coptic Orthodox liturgical practice

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

Open NXIVM

Why It Is Open NXIVM operated as a for-profit company rather than an audited nonprofit, and its collapse proceeded through a criminal racketeering prosecution that produced restitution to named individual victims and forfeitures by named individual defendants, Keith Raniere and Clare Bronfman among them, rather than a receivership or audit of the organization's own combined assets.

What Would Settle It A receiver's accounting, bankruptcy filing, or investigative reporting that totals NXIVM's corporate assets, real estate holdings and revenue as a single organization, distinct from the personal restitution and forfeiture figures tied to individual defendants.

Expertise Needed Corporate and criminal law concerning multi-level marketing and racketeering prosecutions, and investigative journalism covering NXIVM's business structure.

Question posed in Keith Raniere Ordered to Pay 3.5 Million Dollars in Restitution (Associated Press via Global News, 2021), Tom Hays.

Open Northern Crusades

Why It Is Open The Northern Crusades ran from the twelfth into the fifteenth century as separate campaigns against the Wends, the Prussians, the Livonians and Lithuania, fought by different military orders at different times, and the scholarship studies each campaign on its own rather than totaling losses across the whole span.

What Would Settle It A historian's period by period and campaign by campaign casualty accounting across the different Baltic wars, rather than the single figure a shorter, bounded conflict can be given.

Expertise Needed Crusading history, Baltic medieval history, historical demography.

Question posed in God's War: A New History of the Crusades, Christopher Tyerman.

Open Eighth Crusade

Why It Is Open The Eighth Crusade never reached major battle: an epidemic, understood at the time as dysentery, swept the crusader camp outside Tunis and killed Louis IX along with a substantial part of his army's leadership, and the historiography describes that outbreak narratively without estimating how many died from it.

What Would Settle It A historian's or epidemiologist's estimate of deaths in the crusader camp outside Tunis during the 1270 outbreak, distinguishing disease deaths from the campaign's minimal combat losses.

Expertise Needed Crusading history, historical epidemiology.

Question posed in God's War: A New History of the Crusades, Christopher Tyerman.

Open Shwedagon Pagoda

Why It Is Open Gold-tonnage claims for the pagoda circulating in travel journalism range roughly tenfold, six to over sixty tons, and a widely repeated three billion dollar figure for the gem-crowned finial traces to no identifiable primary source or methodology.

What Would Settle It A published inventory or valuation from the Board of Trustees of Shwedagon Pagoda itself, or an independent appraisal by a body with access to weigh and assess the gold and gems in place.

Expertise Needed Cultural heritage appraisal and Myanmar religious-trust administration, and financial journalism with primary-source access.

Question posed in Cash Donations Rising for Myanmar Pagodas: Religion Minister (The Irrawaddy).

Open Holy See

Why It Is Open The Vatican's most valuable holdings, Saint Peter's Basilica, the Sistine Chapel and the Vatican Museums' collections, are inalienable and never appraised for sale, so there is nothing to price against a market the way an ordinary asset is valued. The Holy See's own financial disclosures (APSA's patrimony report, the Secretariat for the Economy's consolidated statement, the IOR's own report) each cover a defined administrative scope and none of them attempts a valuation of the art or the buildings themselves.

What Would Settle It There is no method that would settle this honestly, since a genuine market valuation would require a willingness to sell that the Holy See has never expressed and that the objects' religious and cultural status makes very unlikely ever to exist. What would change the picture is not a single figure but a named methodology the Holy See itself adopted and published for insurance or heritage purposes, stating clearly that it is not a sale value.

Expertise Needed Cultural heritage economics and museum insurance valuation practice, in dialogue with the Holy See's own financial administration.

Question posed in How Much Money Does the Catholic Church Have?.

Open Syria

Why It Is Open The last widely cited figures, about 74 percent Sunni Muslim, 11 percent Alawite, 10 percent Christian, describe the pre-2011 population. A decade of civil war, mass displacement and emigration has since altered the population in ways no subsequent census or survey has measured, so the current composition is not known.

What Would Settle It A new nationally representative census or demographic survey conducted once conditions allow it, accounting for returnees, refugees and the dead.

Expertise Needed Demography

Question posed in Religious Composition of the World, 2010-2020, Pew Research Center.

Open Yarsanism

Why It Is Open Yarsani adherents are folded into Iran's broader Muslim population in its national census, and no other government or denominational body maintains a count of them; every published figure is an undated snapshot from fieldwork, advocacy or journalism rather than one point in a tracked series.

What Would Settle It A dedicated demographic study, most plausibly built from community register data the Yarsani community itself might keep informally, or from a specially commissioned survey, giving dated counts that could be compared over time the way this axis compares other bodies.

Expertise Needed Demography, Iranian religious minority studies

Question posed in The Religious Textual Heritage of the Yarsan (Ahl-e Haqq), Philip G. Kreyenbroek.

Open Lebanon

Why It Is Open No official religious census has been taken in Lebanon since 1932, by policy, to avoid disturbing the sectarian power-sharing arrangement fixed at that count. Every percentage in circulation, including the estimate recorded here, is a modeled estimate rather than a count.

What Would Settle It An official national census that asks and records sectarian religious affiliation, which Lebanese governments have avoided for over ninety years for the same political reason the number stays unknown.

Expertise Needed Demography, political science

Question posed in Religious Composition of the World, 2010-2020, Pew Research Center.

Open Turkey

Why It Is Open Turkish national censuses do not ask about sectarian or Alevi religious identity, so no official count of the Alevi population exists. Published estimates commonly range from about 10 to 20 percent of the population, a spread wide enough to reflect the absence of a count rather than disagreement over one.

What Would Settle It A nationally representative census or independently conducted survey that specifically asks about Alevi self-identification, which the Turkish state census currently does not do.

Expertise Needed Demography, religious studies

Question posed in Religious Composition of the World, 2010-2020, Pew Research Center.

Open Taliban

Why It Is Open World Bank Afghanistan Economic Monitor reports are understood to publish domestic revenue collection figures for the Interim Taliban Administration, but every PDF fetched in research on this returned only encoded binary content, not readable text, and a VOA News article summarizing a report 403 blocked on fetch (queued, BlockedFetchId 26); no figure is recorded here on a search-summary alone.

What Would Settle It A text-extractable copy of a World Bank Afghanistan Economic Monitor or Development Update, or a corroborating IMF Article IV or UN Sanctions Monitoring Team report, actually read rather than summarized.

Expertise Needed Development economics, public finance

Question posed in History of the Academy, Academie des sciences, Academie des sciences.

Open Khuong Tang Hoi

Why It Is Open Khuong Tang Hoi was orphaned young in Jiaozhi and later became a Buddhist monk and translator whose documented career, arriving at the Wu capital and translating scripture, runs up to his death in 280. No source independent of that career record gives a birth year.

What Would Settle It A biographical notice or dated document from Jiaozhi or the Wu court naming Khuong Tang Hoi's age or birth year, distinct from the undated account of his early life as an orphan.

Expertise Needed Early Chinese Buddhist history, history of Jiaozhi under Chinese administration

Question posed in New World Encyclopedia, New World Encyclopedia contributors.