Open Questions

Open Duke of Zhou

Why It Is Open The Duke of Zhou is known only through his role as regent after his brother King Wu's death, an event whose absolute date is not settled. Proposed dates for the Zhou conquest of Shang, on which every early Zhou chronology depends, range across nearly a century of scholarly reconstruction, and no source independently records his own birth or death year.

What Would Settle It A settled absolute date for the Zhou conquest of Shang, which archaeoastronomical and bronze-inscription chronology projects continue to refine, together with an inscriptional or textual source naming the Duke of Zhou's own birth or death year rather than only his role in dynastic events.

Expertise Needed Early Chinese history, Zhou dynasty chronology, Sinology

Question posed in The Cambridge History of Ancient China: From the Origins of Civilization to 221 B.C., Michael Loewe and Edward L. Shaughnessy (eds.).

Open Duke of Zhou

Why It Is Open He is documented as the fourth son of King Wen and brother of King Wu, later given the fief of Zhou near present day Qishan, Shaanxi, but no Zhou era or Han era source states where he was personally born, and the fief he is named for was granted only after the conquest of Shang.

What Would Settle It A Western Zhou era inscription or record naming his birthplace, which no bronze inscription or transmitted text recovered so far supplies.

Expertise Needed Early Chinese history; Western Zhou archaeology and epigraphy

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

Open Imran ibn Hittan

Why It Is Open The medieval biographical dictionaries and modern studies of his verse record his poetry and his Kharijite allegiance but consistently locate his activity rather than his birth.

What Would Settle It A biographical dictionary entry or manuscript colophon naming his birthplace specifically rather than his milieu of activity.

Expertise Needed Early Islamic history, Arabic literature

Question posed in Kharijites (Wikipedia), Wikipedia contributors.

Open Muslim Conquest of the Levant

Why It Is Open The Byzantine and early Islamic sources for the conquest's decisive battle at Yarmouk disagree sharply on the size of the forces involved, and the conquest itself unfolded as a long sequence of sieges and smaller engagements across Syria and Palestine that the scholarship narrates city by city rather than totals.

What Would Settle It A source critical study reconciling the Byzantine and early Islamic casualty traditions for Yarmouk, combined with a historian's accounting of losses across the conquest's separate sieges.

Expertise Needed Early Islamic history, Byzantine history, source criticism.

Question posed in The Great Arab Conquests: How the Spread of Islam Changed the World We Live In, Hugh Kennedy.

Open Muslim Conquest of Egypt

Why It Is Open The conquest is narrated through both the Coptic chronicle tradition and later Arabic accounts, which characterize the fall of Byzantine Egypt differently, and neither the individual sieges of the fortress of Babylon and of Alexandria nor the campaign as a whole has been given a casualty figure by modern historians.

What Would Settle It A source critical study comparing the Coptic and Arabic accounts of the conquest's losses, combined with a historian's estimate for the sieges of Babylon and Alexandria.

Expertise Needed Early Islamic history, Coptic history, source criticism.

Question posed in The Great Arab Conquests: How the Spread of Islam Changed the World We Live In, Hugh Kennedy.

Open Muslim Conquest of North Africa

Why It Is Open The conquest of North Africa took decades of intermittent campaigning against Byzantine coastal strongholds and successive Berber resistance movements, and the scholarship follows that long, uneven sequence of events narratively rather than tallying losses across it the way a shorter, single campaign war can be totaled.

What Would Settle It A historian's period by period accounting of losses against Byzantine garrisons and against Berber resistance across the decades long campaign.

Expertise Needed Early Islamic history, North African history.

Question posed in The Great Arab Conquests: How the Spread of Islam Changed the World We Live In, Hugh Kennedy.

Open Musaylima

Why It Is Open Everything known about Musaylima comes from the testimony of the people who defeated him, Islamic accounts written after his death at the battle of Aqraba in 632 or 633, concerned with his revelation, his following among the Banu Hanifa and his death rather than his early life. No source records when he was born.

What Would Settle It A source independent of the Islamic accounts that defeated and denounced him, from within the Banu Hanifa's own oral or documentary memory, naming a birth year or generation for Musaylima.

Expertise Needed Early Islamic history, pre-Islamic Arabian history

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 Muslim Conquest of Persia

Why It Is Open The conquest's decisive battles at al-Qadisiyyah and Nahavand are described in the surviving Arabic sources, written generations after the events they record, and the scholarship treats those figures with caution while narrating the fall of the Sasanian empire province by province, without ever totaling losses across the whole campaign.

What Would Settle It A source critical study of the earliest surviving casualty claims for al-Qadisiyyah and Nahavand, combined with a historian's accounting of losses across the conquest's provincial campaigns.

Expertise Needed Early Islamic history, Sasanian history, source criticism.

Question posed in The Great Arab Conquests: How the Spread of Islam Changed the World We Live In, Hugh Kennedy.

Open Muslim Conquest of Iberia

Why It Is Open The Visigothic kingdom's defeat at the battle traditionally called Guadalete is described by the near contemporary Chronicle of 754 and by the modern historians who draw on it, but the campaign's rapid overrunning of the Iberian Peninsula afterward is narrated as a sequence of surrenders and sieges rather than quantified, and no historian totals losses across the whole conquest.

What Would Settle It A source critical study of the Chronicle of 754's account of Guadalete combined with a historian's estimate of losses during the conquest's rapid overrunning of the peninsula's cities.

Expertise Needed Early Islamic history, Visigothic history, source criticism.

Question posed in The Great Arab Conquests: How the Spread of Islam Changed the World We Live In, Hugh Kennedy.

Open The Kharijite Rebellions (685 to 699 CE)

Why It Is Open The surviving Arabic chronicle tradition records the rebellions as a sequence of individual battles and sieges across Iraq, Persia and Arabia rather than one accounted campaign, and no modern historian has combined the separate engagements into a war-wide casualty total.

What Would Settle It A systematic tally of the individual battle and siege accounts already preserved in the early Arabic chronicle tradition, cross-checked against what independent evidence of the period's population and military scale can bear, of the kind no historian of the rebellions has yet undertaken.

Expertise Needed Early Islamic history; Arabic chronicle source criticism

Question posed in The Prophet and the Age of the Caliphates: The Islamic Near East from the Sixth to the Eleventh Century, Hugh Kennedy.

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 Bishops' Wars

Why It Is Open The only substantial engagement, the Battle of Newburn, is recorded only as a combined casualty figure of roughly three hundred that does not separate killed from wounded, the First Bishops' War produced no significant battle at all, and no historian has estimated the mortality from disease in the two large armies mustered for the campaigns, which was often the larger cause of death in musters of this period.

What Would Settle It A study working from English and Scottish muster rolls, parish burial records and military pay records for 1639 and 1640, of the kind Fissel's archival research draws on for the campaigns' administration, extended specifically to separate combat deaths from wounded at Newburn and to estimate camp mortality across both musters.

Expertise Needed Early modern British history; military demography

Question posed in The Bishops' Wars: Charles I's Campaigns against Scotland, 1638 to 1640, Mark Charles Fissel.

Open Camisard Rebellion

Why It Is Open Monahan's archival study documents village level destruction and individual engagement casualties across the Cevennes but reports no total figure for the war's dead, and no later historian has aggregated the surviving parish, garrison and property destruction records into one count.

What Would Settle It A systematic tally from the parish, garrison and property destruction records Monahan's own research draws on, combined into a single war wide casualty estimate of the kind no historian has yet published.

Expertise Needed Early modern French history; historical demography

Question posed in Let God Arise: The War and Rebellion of the Camisards, W. Gregory Monahan.

Open Splendor Solis

Why It Is Open Splendor Solis is attributed to Salomon Trismosin, described in the alchemical literature as the teacher of Paracelsus. Nothing outside that literature attests him. Paracelsus, who names many of his sources and quarrels with most of them, never mentions such a teacher. The name itself reads as constructed, joining Solomon to a Hermetic epithet, which is a common pattern in alchemical pseudonymity.

What Would Settle It An archival trace independent of the alchemical corpus, such as a matriculation record, a guild or civic register, a will, or a correspondence naming him, or conversely a manuscript study showing the attribution was added to an already circulating text at a datable point.

Expertise Needed Early modern German archival history and the philology of the alchemical manuscript tradition.

Question posed in Grimoires: A History of Magic Books, Owen Davies.

Open The Würzburg Witch Trials

Why It Is Open Contemporary execution lists survive for parts of the Wurzburg episode, but the trials ran across the city, the surrounding prince-bishopric and its wider territory, and different surviving lists count these differently; the records are incomplete and no modern historian has reconciled them into a single agreed total, unlike the single well documented parish record behind the Torsaker toll or the court record behind Salem's.

What Would Settle It A systematic reconciliation of the surviving city, diocesan and territorial execution lists against one agreed boundary for what counts as the Wurzburg trials, of the kind regional archival historians have already carried out for other German territories.

Expertise Needed Early modern German history; archival history of the witch trials

Question posed in Witches and Witch-Hunts: A Global History, Wolfgang Behringer.

Open Edward Kelley

Why It Is Open The Enochian material rests entirely on Kelley's reports of what appeared in the showstone, recorded by John Dee. Dee's diaries are strong evidence of what Dee believed and weak evidence of what actually occurred. Frances Yates called Kelley a fraud outright; others treat him as a genuine visionary or as self-deceived. The question is central to how the whole Enochian corpus should be read and is not settled.

What Would Settle It It may be unresolvable in principle, which is worth recording as such. It would move on evidence of Kelley preparing material in advance, or on linguistic analysis of the Enochian corpus bearing on whether it was composed rather than received.

Expertise Needed Early modern history, palaeography, and historical linguistics for the Enochian corpus itself.

Question posed in John Dee's Conversations with Angels: Cabala, Alchemy, and the End of Nature, Deborah E. Harkness, Pages 11 and 24.

Open Irish Confederate Wars

Why It Is Open William Petty's 1650s Down Survey remains the era's only systematic contemporary count, and modern historians including Lenihan treat his method, extrapolating from incomplete surveys and combining combat, massacre, famine and plague deaths into one total, as unreliable for a precise war-specific figure without offering a reconciled alternative of their own.

What Would Settle It A modern demographic reconstruction applying consistent method to seventeenth century Irish parish, estate and muster records, capable of separating combat and massacre deaths from the era's simultaneous, and largely coincidental, famine and plague mortality.

Expertise Needed Early modern Irish history; historical demography

Question posed in Confederate Catholics at War, 1641 to 1649, Padraig Lenihan.

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 Maasai

Why It Is Open The pantheon holds one deity, Engai, and this atlas has no entry yet for Maasai traditional religion. Comparable East and Southern African traditions already have their own entries, Zulu Traditional Religion and Shona Traditional Religion among them, so the absence is a gap in coverage rather than a considered position.

What Would Settle It An entry for Maasai traditional religion, written to the same standard as the Zulu and Shona entries, after which the pantheon links with no further decision.

Expertise Needed East African ethnography; Maasai religious studies

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

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.