Open Questions

Open Reformed Egyptian

Why It Is Open Reformed Egyptian is described only inside the Book of Mormon's own text, attributed to Nephite scribes modifying Egyptian characters over centuries. No inscription, manuscript or artifact outside that text has been identified as an example of it, and mainstream Egyptology and historical linguistics have found no independent evidence such a script existed, so there is nothing external against which to locate an origin.

What Would Settle It An inscription or manuscript independently datable and decipherable, found outside the Book of Mormon tradition, that could be shown on linguistic or archaeological grounds to be the same writing system, would give scholars an actual artifact to locate and analyze.

Expertise Needed Egyptology and historical linguistics

Question posed in The Book of Mormon, Joseph Smith (translator, by his own account), Mormon 9:32-34.

Open Reflexology

Why It Is Open The Sixth Dynasty relief at Saqqara is very widely cited by reflexology sources as evidence of ancient Egyptian practice. Egyptological readings of the same scene as ordinary manicure, pedicure or medical care exist. Engy El-Kilany has published a survey of foot care scenes in Egyptian tombs which secondary reports quote as calling the nature of the therapy depicted still debated, but that paper could not be obtained, and no Egyptological analysis settling the question either way has been found.

What Would Settle It A published Egyptological analysis of the Ankhmahor relief addressing the reflexology claim directly, either way.

Expertise Needed Egyptology and the history of medicine.

Question posed in Reflexology: Panacea or Placebo?, Hylton B. Menz, Paragraph on the tomb of Ankhmahor.

Open Juniper

Why It Is Open Juniper is used in numerous ancient contexts, medicinal, embalming and ritual, but no single dated text or excavation has been confirmed as the earliest securely dated reference to its aromatic or incense use specifically.

What Would Settle It A study of ancient Egyptian or Near Eastern medical and ritual texts fixing the earliest securely dated mention of juniper's aromatic or fumigant use.

Expertise Needed Egyptology, archaeobotany

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

Open Blue Lotus

Why It Is Open The iconographic case, argued by Emboden, is substantial: the flower is held to the nose with unusual persistence in banquet scenes, some figures appear to be in altered states, and it is linked to wine and to the drinking festivals of Hathor. The pharmacological case is weak. Apomorphine and nuciferine are present in small amounts, apomorphine is a strong emetic rather than a pleasant intoxicant, and no psychoactive dose has been shown achievable from a quantity of flowers a person would plausibly use.

What Would Settle It Quantitative analysis of alkaloid content in Nymphaea caerulea grown under conditions comparable to ancient Egypt, plus a controlled account of the effect of a realistic dose. Residue analysis of vessels from banquet or funerary contexts would help. Note that ololiuqui was doubted on similar grounds for centuries and then vindicated, so an absence of demonstrated activity is not evidence of absence.

Expertise Needed Egyptology, ethnobotany, phytochemistry

Question posed in Transcultural Use of Narcotic Water Lilies in Ancient Egyptian and Maya Drug Ritual, William A. Emboden.

Open Nefertem

Why It Is Open The name is written nfr plus tm and both halves are ambiguous. It is read as "Atum is beautiful", making the god a statement about the creator, and it is read as "the beautiful one who closes", making it a description of the lotus shutting at dusk. The two readings imply different theologies and Egyptological reference works give both without settling between them.

What Would Settle It An early attestation where the name is written with a determinative or in a context that disambiguates tm as the divine name rather than the verb, or a demonstrably early orthography that rules one reading out.

Expertise Needed Egyptology, philology

Question posed in The Oxford Encyclopedia of Ancient Egypt, Donald B. Redford (ed.).

Open Tutankhamun

Why It Is Open He is usually assumed to have been born at Akhetaten (Amarna), his father's court city, but this follows from an inference about his contested parentage rather than from a direct record; no inscription or administrative document names his birthplace.

What Would Settle It Resolution of his parentage (whether his father was Akhenaten or Smenkhkare) together with an inscription or administrative record placing his birth directly; neither currently exists.

Expertise Needed Egyptology; Amarna period studies; ancient DNA and mummy studies

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

Open Seti I

Why It Is Open Like nearly every pharaoh of the New Kingdom, Seti I's birth was not the subject of any surviving record; his father's military family had roots near Avaris in the north eastern Nile Delta, but that is the origin of the Ramesside line rather than a record of Seti's own birthplace specifically.

What Would Settle It An inscription or administrative record naming his birthplace directly, which no source recovered to date supplies.

Expertise Needed Egyptology; New Kingdom administrative history

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

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 The Great Table of the Watchtowers

Why It Is Open Governor sigils are documented as letter-by-letter traces of each governor's name through the Great Table Watchtowers, revealed to Dee and Kelley. Reproducing one accurately needs the Watchtower grid content plus each governor's starting square and reading direction, or a faithful trace of the published sigil image. Neither has been obtained: the standard reference article on the governors and their sigils could not be reached, and no digitized coordinate table has surfaced elsewhere. Recreating the Watchtower grid from memory and presenting it as verified would be fabrication.

What Would Settle It Either a clean digitized source giving Watchtower grid coordinates per governor name, or visual access good enough to trace the published sigil images faithfully, checked against at least one other published rendering for agreement.

Expertise Needed Enochian Magic

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

Open Intinction

Why It Is Open Churches suspended the common cup during the influenza pandemic of 1918 and again in the epidemics of the following century, and intinction and individual glasses spread as a result. This run deliberately made no claim about transmission risk because it could not verify one, and the relationship between what has been measured and what churches actually decided is not established here.

What Would Settle It A review of the published microbiological and epidemiological studies of the shared chalice, paired with the actual decisions of church authorities, to establish whether the evidence drove the practice or followed it.

Expertise Needed Epidemiology; liturgical studies

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

Open The Bengal Presidency Sati Returns

Why It Is Open The only numerical record is the East India Company series of 1815 to 1828, which covers one presidency, was compiled while prohibition was being argued for, and is concentrated around the seat of the administration that compiled it. The positions in circulation, that the practice was rare and inflated by reformers or that it was widespread and understated, are competing readings of that single series rather than independent measurements. Nobody has produced a count for any earlier period.

What Would Settle It A regional demographic study built from evidence the Company never touched: memorial stones for immolated women, which survive in numbers across western and southern India and can in principle be dated, located and counted; vernacular temple, land and family records for periods and districts outside Company reach; and inscriptional corpora already published but never assembled for this question. Both bodies of material have been used locally and never aggregated.

Expertise Needed Epigraphy and inscriptional history, historical demography, and regional social history working in the relevant vernaculars.

Question posed in Contentious Traditions: The Debate on Sati in Colonial India, Lata Mani.

Open The Sethian Curse Tablets of Rome

Why It Is Open The atlas records this page's language as Latin, which renders as a language chip. The standard scholarly description of the group Wunsch published in 1898, the tablets from a columbarium on the Via Appia, reports it as largely Greek, with the charioteers, horses and factions carrying Latin names. The two statements cannot both be right, and no page-level citation for either has been located yet. The neighbouring British tablets, Bath and Uley, are correctly Latin, which is probably how the value arrived here.

What Would Settle It A language census of the tablets in Richard Wunsch, Sethianische Verfluchungstafeln aus Rom, Leipzig 1898, counting the edited texts by script and noting any Latin written in Greek letters. The edition is public domain and already catalogued in this atlas. R. S. Conway reviewed it in the Classical Review 13.4, May 1899, pages 224 to 226. Audollent, Defixionum Tabellae, 1904, also catalogued here, carries further tablets of the class and would corroborate. If the group is genuinely bilingual, the finding is not a corrected language value but that a single recorded language cannot describe this page, and that is the more useful result.

Expertise Needed Epigraphy and the papyrology of the Greek magical corpus

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

Open James Ossuary

Why It Is Open The rest of the inscription is Lemaire's securely read and palaeographically dated first century text, but the final clause survives only through a chain of contested physical evidence: the Israel Antiquities Authority's 2003 committees read a difference in patina and letter depth at exactly that clause, Oded Golan's 2012 criminal trial ended in acquittal for want of proof rather than a finding that the clause is ancient, and subsequent patina and isotope analyses from scientists on both sides of the case read the same kind of physical evidence in opposite directions.

What Would Settle It A single non-destructive patina or isotope protocol agreed by laboratories on both sides of the dispute, run on samples taken from across the whole inscription rather than only the disputed clause, with the raw data and method published for independent review rather than each side re-reading data produced under its own protocol.

Expertise Needed Epigraphy; archaeometry; forensic materials science

Question posed in Burial Box of James the Brother of Jesus, Andre Lemaire.

Open The Persecution of Beta Israel Under Ethiopia's Solomonic Emperors

Why It Is Open The surviving Ethiopian chronicle record names individual episodes across two centuries of intermittent campaigns, the execution of the rebel leader Goshen and reports of mass suicide rather than conversion, but no ancient or modern historian consulted has attempted a running total across the whole span from Yeshaq to Susenyos.

What Would Settle It A systematic collation of the surviving Ethiopian royal chronicles across each named campaign, of the kind that could establish a documented floor for at least the better-recorded episodes even without a claim to completeness for the whole two centuries.

Expertise Needed Ethiopian history; Ethiopian royal chronicle studies

Question posed in History of the Jews in Ethiopia (Wikipedia).

Open Nahas (Na) ነ

Why It Is Open A few Ge'ez letter names are transparently words in the language: bet is a house, gaml is a camel, and the word behind res is the word for a head. Most are not, and several, nahas among them, resemble Ge'ez words closely enough to invite a gloss that nothing supports. The atlas records no meaning for those letters, which is a statement about the evidence and leaves open whether the Ethiopian tradition itself ever attached senses to them.

What Would Settle It A survey of the Ge'ez grammatical and church-school literature for any indigenous account of the letter names, set against the comparative reconstruction of the Northwest Semitic names, would show whether an Ethiopian gloss tradition exists and what it says.

Expertise Needed Ethiopian philology and the history of the traditional church schools

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

Open Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church

Why It Is Open The word asrat, literally "tithe", is well documented historically, but as a state-administered land tax of one tenth of agricultural produce collected by secular officials (mesle, gult gash, cheqa shum), administered separately from the Church's own monastic gult land holdings, per a peer-reviewed regional economic history of one Ethiopian ruler's own early-20th-century tax system. Two bands across this axis have now searched (scholarly databases, the Fetha Nagast, the Encyclopaedia Aethiopica) and found no canonical or doctrinal Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church text stating a personal member giving percentage. A modern US diaspora parish's own fundraising campaign uses the word "Asrat" in its title, showing the term is in living use, but a single campaign title is not a doctrinal statement of what the Church formally expects.

What Would Settle It A direct reading of a canonical Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church text, a Holy Synod statement, or a scholarly ethnography of contemporary EOTC parish finance (in Ethiopia or in the diaspora) stating whether an ordinary member is expected to give a set percentage of income and what follows if they do not.

Expertise Needed Ethiopian studies, primary source review of Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church canonical texts

Question posed in The Taxation System of Ras Haylu Taklu Haymanot of Gojjam: 1907-1932, Geremew Eskezia.

Open Ayahuasca Vine

Why It Is Open Two unrelated plants, out of the tens of thousands in the Amazon, must be combined for either to have any effect, and nothing about the appearance, taste or separate action of either suggests the other. Explanations range from very long systematic experimentation to the answer the traditions give, which is that the plants communicated it. The record is oral and the practice is old.

What Would Settle It Probably nothing can settle it. What would help is comparative work on how many other plant pairings are known in Amazonian practice, since a tradition with many such combinations implies a method, while a single one implies an accident or a transmission.

Expertise Needed Ethnobotany, Amazonian anthropology, ethnopharmacology

Question posed in Vegetalismo: Shamanism among the Mestizo Population of the Peruvian Amazon, Luis Eduardo Luna.

Open Salvia Divinorum

Why It Is Open The plant has no confirmed wild population, sets seed poorly and is propagated from cuttings, which points to long cultivation, as with kava and Brugmansia. But there is no colonial record of it, unlike the mushrooms and ololiuqui which the friars documented extensively, and no archaeological evidence. So the plant looks ancient and the documentation begins in the twentieth century.

What Would Settle It Discovery of a wild population would settle the origin. A colonial or pre-conquest reference, possibly under a name not yet connected to it, would settle the antiquity. Genetic work on cultivated clones could estimate how long it has been propagated vegetatively.

Expertise Needed Ethnobotany, plant genetics, Mesoamerican ethnohistory

Question posed in Ethnopharmacology of Ska Maria Pastora (Salvia divinorum, Epling and Jativa-M.), Leander J. Valdes III, Jose Luis Diaz and Ara G. Paul.

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 Palo Santo

Why It Is Open Palo santo's traditional use predates any documentation checked so far, and no specific dated colonial era or archaeological source naming it has been located.

What Would Settle It An ethnohistorical study of early colonial Spanish accounts of coastal Ecuadorian and Peruvian ritual practice, or an archaeobotanical identification of Bursera graveolens residue from a securely dated find.

Expertise Needed Ethnohistory, archaeobotany

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