Open Questions

Open Gede

Why It Is Open Gede is attested as a family and title name attached to individual spirits, Gede Nibo and Gede Zaraignen among them, rather than as one deity's own proper name. A West African, Dahomean origin has been proposed given Haitian Vodou's broader Fon and Kongo ancestry, but no single derivation has become the settled reading.

What Would Settle It A linguistic study tracing the word to a specific West African source language, Fon or otherwise, or an early colonial-era or immediate post-colonial record of the term predating its documented use as the spirit family's title.

Expertise Needed Haitian Creole linguistics, Africanist studies of Fon and Kongo antecedents

Question posed in The Faces of the Gods: Vodou and Roman Catholicism in Haiti, Leslie G. Desmangles.

Open The Yellow Turban Rebellion

Why It Is Open Historians frequently repeat casualty figures in the millions for the rebellion, but these numbers, where they can be traced at all, describe the population loss of the following decades of civil war, famine and displacement across northern China rather than deaths in the rebellion itself, and no modern historian has isolated a defensible toll for the rising and its suppression alone.

What Would Settle It A modern historian's attempt to separate combat and reprisal deaths during the 184 CE rising itself from the much larger population loss of the decades of civil war, famine and displacement that followed it and that the rebellion helped set in motion.

Expertise Needed Han dynasty history; historical demography of early imperial China

Question posed in The Encyclopedia of Taoism, Fabrizio Pregadio (ed.).

Open Naturopathy

Why It Is Open Regulation differs sharply by state, province and country, and the licensing picture changes. Summary figures circulate but could not be verified against primary regulatory sources at the time of writing.

What Would Settle It A jurisdiction-by-jurisdiction check against the regulators themselves, with the date of the check recorded, since the answer decays.

Expertise Needed Health policy and comparative regulatory law.

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

Open Asham (The Reparation Offering)

Why It Is Open No ancient source states the distinction in terms that decide the cases where both appear. The reparation offering covers both sanctuary property and private fraud compounded by a false oath, and no single principle proposed so far accounts for that pairing without strain.

What Would Settle It A comparative study of reparation terminology in the wider ancient Near Eastern legal and cultic corpora, set against the Priestly cases, would test whether the pairing is a Priestly innovation or an inherited category.

Expertise Needed Hebrew Bible philology, comparative ancient Near Eastern law

Question posed in Leviticus 1-16: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary, Jacob Milgrom.

Open Chatat (The Purification Offering)

Why It Is Open The two readings derive the noun from different senses of the same verb stem, and the biblical text supports each in different passages. The offering is required where no wrong has been done, which favours the purification reading, but the same chapters use the ordinary language of forgiveness, which does not.

What Would Settle It This is a question of interpretation rather than of missing evidence, and it will not be closed by a discovery. What would advance it is a full account of the class that explains the childbirth and discharge cases and the forgiveness formulae together, rather than treating either group as residual.

Expertise Needed Hebrew Bible philology, Priestly source criticism

Question posed in Leviticus 1-16: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary, Jacob Milgrom.

Open Kapparah

Why It Is Open Scholars of the Hebrew Bible hold opposing readings of the same texts. A strong modern position takes the chatat as purging the sanctuary of accumulated impurity, with the animal never described as punished; older readings take covering as the governing sense of kipper and read a transfer. The answer bears directly on whether the Christian atonement theories may argue from these rites the way several of them do.

What Would Settle It Close philological work on the objects and prepositions the verb kipper takes across the whole priestly corpus, read alongside comparative material from neighbouring ritual systems, rather than through the categories of later theology.

Expertise Needed Hebrew Bible philology; the study of priestly ritual; comparative ancient Near Eastern religion

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

Open Salamander

Why It Is Open The Persian compound reading (sam, "fire," plus andar, "inside") most Persian lexicographers now treat as a later back-formation from the Greek word rather than its source, and the standard modern authority on Greek etymology, Beekes, classifies salamandra itself as Pre-Greek, meaning no successful Indo-European derivation for the word has been established.

What Would Settle It Either a securely attested Pre-Greek Aegean word the name can be shown to derive from, or new philological evidence settling the direction of borrowing between Greek and Persian rather than leaving it a rejected folk etymology on the Persian side.

Expertise Needed Historical and comparative Indo-European linguistics, Pre-Greek substrate studies, Iranian philology

Question posed in Etymological Dictionary of Greek, Robert S. P. Beekes, with Lucien van Beek.

Open Bunjil

Why It Is Open Bunjil is attested across the Kulin nation ethnographic record in several colonial-era spellings, recorded by nineteenth century observers working across related but distinct language groups with no shared orthography. The word plainly identifies the creator ancestor with the wedge-tailed eagle, but no confirmed derivation of the word itself, reconciling the recorded dialect variation into one settled origin, has been established.

What Would Settle It A linguistic reconstruction of the word across the Kulin language family from a qualified historical linguist, comparing the recorded spelling variants to establish whether one original form and meaning can be recovered, or an early wordlist or grammar predating the surviving colonial-era transcriptions.

Expertise Needed Historical and comparative linguistics of the Kulin languages, ethnohistory of south-eastern Australia

Question posed in The Native Tribes of South-East Australia, A. W. Howitt.

Open The Scapegoat Rite of Yom Kippur

Why It Is Open Mishnah tractate Yoma names a site east of Jerusalem and describes a cliff, a measured route and a series of stations along it, but the name is spelled differently across the manuscript traditions and no identification on the ground has been established. No candidate site has a scholarly case mounted for it, so this is an unfilled gap rather than a contested identification.

What Would Settle It A survey along the plausible routes east of Jerusalem for a cliff matching the described distance, together with the remains of the staged booths, could produce a candidate. A firmer reading of the place name from the better manuscript traditions would narrow the search before any fieldwork.

Expertise Needed Historical geography of Judaea, rabbinic manuscript studies, field archaeology

Question posed in The Mishnah, Anonymous (rabbinic compilers), Yoma.

Open San Religion

Why It Is Open There is no answer on record and nobody holds a position, because the evidence to hold one was never gathered. Wilhelm Bleek and Lucy Lloyd recorded /Xam between 1870 and 1884 and their work ended when their narrators went home and no further speakers could be found. The neighbouring communities of the southern and eastern Cape were recorded by no one. Their languages have no speakers and their descendants were absorbed into other communities. The San religion described in the scholarly literature is therefore the religion of the /Xam and of a small number of twentieth-century northern groups, generalised, and the generalisation covers an absence rather than a consensus.

What Would Settle It Recovery of further colonial-era linguistic or missionary material comparable to the Bleek and Lloyd notebooks: unpublished mission-station vocabularies, magistrates' and travellers' notebooks, or word lists held in South African, Dutch, German and British archives that have not been catalogued as linguistic material and so have not been looked for. A systematic archival survey aimed at this specific question has not been carried out. Failing that, the question stays open permanently, which is itself worth recording.

Expertise Needed Historical linguistics of the Khoisan languages; archival research in southern African, Dutch, German and British colonial and mission collections; southern African social history.

Question posed in Specimens of Bushman Folklore, W. H. I. Bleek and L. C. Lloyd.

Open Nazca

Why It Is Open The Nazca (about 100 BCE to 800 CE) left no writing system, so no text records their own speech. The Quechua and Aymara families dominant on the Peruvian south coast today arrived through Inca imperial expansion in the fifteenth century and Spanish colonial administration afterward, six hundred years or more after Nazca civilization had already ended, so their modern presence cannot be read backward onto the Nazca population. Scholarship on Andean historical linguistics treats a Quechuan or Aymaran tie for the pre-Inca south coast cultures as speculative, resting on colonial-era impressions of multilingualism that may equally reflect internal variation within those two families elsewhere in the Andes.

What Would Settle It A securely dated Nazca-period inscription would settle it outright, but none has been found and the culture is understood to have had no writing system at all. Short of that, a documented layer of loanwords or toponyms in a later, attested language that can be traced specifically and exclusively to the pre-Inca Rio Grande de Nasca drainage, rather than to the wider post-Inca Quechua-speaking Andes, would be evidence a historical linguist could evaluate.

Expertise Needed Historical linguistics, archaeology

Question posed in The Languages of the Andes, Willem F. H. Adelaar with Pieter C. Muysken.

Open Benzoin

Why It Is Open Benzoin, Styrax benzoin from Sumatra, was historically confused in trade and in texts with storax, a different resin from the Mediterranean, so an early mention of a term such as luban jawi cannot be taken as securely naming this specific substance without study establishing when the two were first reliably distinguished.

What Would Settle It A study of medieval Arab and European trade records tracing when a term for Sumatran benzoin first securely denotes it as distinct from Mediterranean storax.

Expertise Needed Historical linguistics, trade history

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

Open Basque

Why It Is Open Basque is the last pre-Indo-European language of western Europe and has no demonstrated relative. Proposals linking it to the Caucasian languages, to Iberian and to a wider Vasconic substrate have each been made and none has convinced. R. L. Trask, who assessed them, concluded that none of them meets the standard and that the honest answer is that we do not know, rather than that the relatives are contested. Aquitanian, the ancestor of Basque or its near relative, is attested only in Roman-era personal and divine names on inscriptions and reaches no further back.

What Would Settle It New epigraphic material in Aquitanian or in a neighbouring undeciphered language, long enough to show grammar rather than names alone, would give the comparative method something to work with. A decipherment of Iberian that showed grammatical morphology rather than a shared writing system would settle the Iberian question either way. Failing new text, the answer is likely to stay open, because the comparative method cannot reach the required depth on the evidence that survives.

Expertise Needed Historical linguistics, with palaeohispanic epigraphy

Question posed in The History of Basque, R. L. Trask.

Open Sumerian

Why It Is Open Sumerian is recorded in quantity from the late fourth millennium BCE and is the earliest written language anywhere, yet no genetic connection to another language or family has ever been demonstrated to the standard the comparative method requires. Proposals linking it to Dravidian, to Uralic, to the Caucasian families, to Sino-Tibetan and to Basque have each been published and none has been taken up. There is no camp to join and no argument in progress, which is what separates this from a contested classification: the absence is of an answer, not of agreement.

What Would Settle It A set of regular sound correspondences between Sumerian and another attested language or reconstructed proto-language, covering basic vocabulary and grammatical morphology rather than isolated look-alikes, and surviving the usual controls for borrowing and for chance resemblance. Failing that, a substantial text in a related language recovered from the same region and period would give the comparison something to work from. At present Sumerian's nearest neighbours in the record are Akkadian, which is Semitic and demonstrably unrelated, and Elamite, which is itself an isolate.

Expertise Needed Historical linguistics; Assyriology; comparative philology

Question posed in The Sumerian Language: An Introduction to Its History and Grammatical Structure, Marie-Louise Thomsen.

Open Penal Substitution

Why It Is Open Anselm framed punishment and satisfaction as alternatives and chose satisfaction, while the Reformed doctrine makes the satisfaction consist in the punishment being borne, and moves the setting from a court of honour to a criminal one. Both a continuity reading and a discontinuity reading are argued by serious historians of doctrine, and each has a stake in the answer: continuity supports the claim of an unbroken Western tradition, discontinuity supports the charge of a sixteenth century innovation.

What Would Settle It A study of the sixteenth century Reformed texts tracing exactly where the penal vocabulary enters, which medieval sources those writers were reading, and whether they understood themselves to be restating Anselm or correcting him. Their own statements about what they were doing have not been collected in one place.

Expertise Needed Historical theology; Reformation studies; medieval intellectual history

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

Open Sicilian Folk Religion

Why It Is Open Everything known about the donne di fuori comes from sixteenth and seventeenth century Inquisition trial transcripts, an adversarial record built from interrogation rather than celebration, and no source independent of that prosecution says how established the belief already was when the trials began.

What Would Settle It A Sicilian civil, notarial or ecclesiastical record predating the sixteenth century that references night-gathering spirit-women under any name would show the belief already existed before the surviving trial record begins.

Expertise Needed history and folklore studies

Question posed in The Ladies from Outside (Henningsen), Gustav Henningsen, in Bengt Ankarloo and Gustav Henningsen (eds.).

Open Diloggun

Why It Is Open The two are the same oracle by descent, and most of the sixteen parent names carry across, but the earliest substantial documentation of Cuban practice dates from the twentieth century, long after the transatlantic crossing. Everything between is inferred from the state of the two traditions when they were finally recorded.

What Would Settle It Earlier documentary evidence of Cuban practice: colonial administrative or ecclesiastical records describing cowrie divination, or dated libretas from the nineteenth century with a secure provenance.

Expertise Needed History of Afro-Cuban religion; archival history of colonial Cuba

Question posed in Sixteen Cowries: Yoruba Divination from Africa to the New World, William Bascom.

Open Zosimos of Panopolis

Why It Is Open Every source on Zosimos, his own treatises and the later Byzantine and Arabic writers who cite him, fixes only the period in which he was demonstrably active, around 300 CE in Greco-Roman Egypt, and none supplies a birth year.

What Would Settle It A dated document, inscription or external biographical notice about Zosimos independent of his own writings, naming a birth year rather than only his working period.

Expertise Needed History of alchemy, papyrology, late antique Egyptian history

Question posed in The Secrets of Alchemy, Lawrence M. Principe.

Open Western Astrology

Why It Is Open The table reaches us as a table. Vettius Valens transmits it in the Anthology and Claudius Ptolemy records it in the Tetrabiblos, and Ptolemy is himself the source of the complaint: he objects that the Egyptian writers set out no proof and no ordering principle for the boundaries they give, which is his stated reason for offering a set of his own. Nothing in the surviving sources states the rule that produced the sequence of rulers or the width of each of the sixty stretches. Modern scholarship has not established one either. This is not a disagreement between camps with positions a reader could go and weigh; it is a gap nobody has filled, which is why the atlas records the sixty figures as transmitted and supplies no rationale behind them.

What Would Settle It A Greek or demotic astrological papyrus that gives the bounds together with any statement of how they were arrived at would settle it directly. Failing that, a securely dated table earlier than Valens showing the boundaries in an intermediate state would show whether they were computed or inherited. A third route is arithmetical rather than documentary: the five planetary totals in this table are Venus 82, Jupiter 79, Mercury 76, Mars 66 and Saturn 57, summing to exactly 360, and a systematic comparison of those figures and of the individual widths against the planetary period numbers used in Babylonian and Hellenistic astronomy would show whether the table is derived from them or independent of them.

Expertise Needed History of ancient astronomy and astrology; Greek and demotic papyrology; Babylonian mathematical astronomy

Question posed in Tetrabiblos, Claudius Ptolemy, Tetrabiblos, Book I.

Open Ptolemy

Why It Is Open Ptolemy's entire attested career was at Alexandria, where he made his astronomical observations, but no ancient source records where he was born; a medieval Arabic tradition names Ptolemais Hermiou in Upper Egypt, unsupported by any earlier source and generally doubted by modern historians of science.

What Would Settle It A Hellenistic or early Roman record naming his birthplace directly, independent of the later Arabic tradition.

Expertise Needed History of ancient astronomy; classical scholarship

Question posed in A History of Western Astrology, Nicholas Campion.