Open Questions

Open The Kotel Pilgrimage

Why It Is Open The atlas holds no catalogued source establishing the present division of the plaza, which forms of prayer are conducted where, or where authority over those decisions rests. The arrangements have changed more than once and are the subject of continuing public and legal argument in Israel, so a description taken from a general history would very likely be out of date and would risk asserting one party's position as settled.

What Would Settle It Cataloguing the governing Israeli instruments and any current court decisions, together with the published positions of the parties to the dispute, so that the entry can describe the arrangement and the disagreement about it from documents rather than from report.

Expertise Needed Israeli religious law and public administration, and contemporary Jewish religious sociology

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

Open Jainism

Why It Is Open The facet detector reports Jainism as carrying no Practice of kind Therapeutic while its Dharmic peers do. Jain fasting is ascetic rather than curative, and bhaishajya dana, the giving of medicine, is one of the four danas and so is charitable. Triage on 2026-07-29 could not name a Jain practice whose purpose is healing.

What Would Settle It A survey of the Shvetambara and Digambara prescriptive literature and of modern Jain institutional practice for a named healing observance, together with a ruling on whether Jain animal hospitals and the pinjrapole count as a therapeutic practice or as charity.

Expertise Needed Jain studies, South Asian religious history

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

Open Purvas

Why It Is Open The Purvas do not survive in any form. What is known of them comes entirely from later Jain canonical descriptions of their existence and content, not from the texts themselves, and no source outside the Jain tradition independently confirms either their content or that they trace to Mahavira's own teaching.

What Would Settle It The discovery of a surviving Purva manuscript, or an independent near-contemporary reference describing their actual content, would let the tradition's account of their origin be checked against something other than later restatement of the same tradition.

Expertise Needed Jain textual history and Indology

Question posed in The Jaina Path of Purification, Padmanabh S. Jaini.

Open Great Buddha of Kamakura

Why It Is Open No inscription, temple record or contemporary chronicle names the sculptor, workshop or foundry responsible for casting the 1252 bronze, unlike a number of later Japanese Buddhist bronzes whose makers are documented.

What Would Settle It A surviving Kamakura-period temple record, a foundry mark recovered from inside the hollow bronze during conservation work, or a documentary source not yet examined naming the casting workshop.

Expertise Needed Japanese art history, Kamakura-period documentary history

Question posed in Great Buddha of Kamakura (Wikipedia), Wikipedia contributors.

Open Yasukuni Shrine

Why It Is Open Japan's Religious Corporations Law exempts income associated with worship from taxation and standing financial disclosure, and no figure for Yasukuni Shrine's own annual income or operating budget was located despite the shrine's unusual level of political and journalistic scrutiny on other matters.

What Would Settle It A voluntary published account from Yasukuni Shrine's own administration naming its annual offering income or operating budget, or investigative reporting that obtains one despite the general non-disclosure norm.

Expertise Needed Japanese religious corporation law and Shinto shrine administration, and investigative or political journalism covering Yasukuni Shrine specifically.

Question posed in Shrine Funds: Japan's Religious Sites and Their Undisclosed Cash (Japan Times via Green Shinto, 2018), Philip Brasor and Masako Tsubuku.

Open Sunan Kalijaga

Why It Is Open Sunan Kalijaga is known only through Javanese chronicle and hagiographic tradition centuries removed from his life, and even the popularly repeated 1450 birth year and 1513 death year are not agreed, with some accounts giving a death year decades later.

What Would Settle It A contemporary Javanese court chronicle, inscription or other independently datable record naming Sunan Kalijaga's birth or death, distinct from the popular hagiographic tradition that presently supplies the only dates in circulation.

Expertise Needed Javanese history, history of Islam in Indonesia

Question posed in Gamelan: Cultural Interaction and Musical Development in Central Java, Sumarsam.

Open Sunan Kalijaga

Why It Is Open Everything told about him comes from Javanese babad and hagiographic literature composed two to four centuries after the period it describes, mostly at the courts of Surakarta and Yogyakarta. No dated inscription, no sixteenth-century Portuguese or Malay report, and no archival document has been securely connected to him. The result is not a disagreement between scholars but an absence: no defended set of dates exists to disagree about.

What Would Settle It A dated epigraphic find at Kadilangu or at the Demak mosque naming him would give the cycle a fixed point. So would an early European or Malay archival mention independent of the babad tradition. Failing either, a systematic codicological dating of the earliest babad manuscripts would at least establish when the figure took his present shape, which is a smaller but answerable question.

Expertise Needed Javanese philology and codicology; Islamic epigraphy of Java; early modern archival history of the Indonesian archipelago

Question posed in Gamelan: Cultural Interaction and Musical Development in Central Java, Sumarsam.

Open Shtreimel

Why It Is Open Three accounts circulate and none is documented: adoption of Polish or Russian noble dress; a decree said to have required Jews to wear an animal tail, for which no text has been produced; and the honouring of Shabbat with the best available in a cold climate. Jewish law neither requires nor mentions the garment, so there is no legal literature to trace it through, and it was written about only long after it was in use.

What Would Settle It Dated communal records, sumptuary or discriminatory legislation from the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth or the Russian Empire naming a fur headcovering for Jews, rabbinic responsa or communal takkanot referring to it, portraiture or inventories from the eighteenth century, and dress-history comparison with the szlachta kolpak.

Expertise Needed Jewish social history of eastern Europe; dress history; archival research in Polish, Russian, Hebrew and Yiddish sources

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

Open Sefer HaRazim (Book of the Mysteries)

Why It Is Open The text presents itself as angelic revelation rather than the work of a named human author, and it survives in no single complete manuscript, only later medieval copies and Cairo Geniza fragments assembled into a modern critical reconstruction, so neither its compiler nor a precise date can be read directly off any single witness.

What Would Settle It An earlier or more complete manuscript witness, or an external contemporary reference to the text, would help fix its date and origin; comparative philological work situating its Greek-influenced Hebrew more precisely within the late antique Jewish magical corpus could narrow the range further.

Expertise Needed Jewish studies and late antique magical and esoteric textual studies

Question posed in Sefer Ha-Razim: The Book of the Mysteries (Michael A. Morgan), Michael A. Morgan, translator, based on Mordecai Margalioth's critical Hebrew reconstruction.

Open Moses Cordovero

Why It Is Open His surname reflects his family's presumed origin among the Jews expelled from Cordoba in 1492, but that is an inference from the family name, not a birth record; his entire documented life took place in Safed, where he led the kabbalistic academy that counted Isaac Luria among its students.

What Would Settle It A contemporary document or family record naming his actual birthplace, which no source recovered to date supplies.

Expertise Needed Jewish studies; history of Kabbalah; Sephardic genealogy

Question posed in Encyclopaedia Judaica, 2nd edition, Michael Berenbaum and Fred Skolnik (eds.).

Open Ghmerti

Why It Is Open Ghmerti is the old Kartvelian word for the divine and remains the modern Georgian word for the Christian God, and the medieval chronicles that describe the pre-Christian Kartlian pantheon survive only in Christian-era compilation, written by authors already using the same word for the god of the new religion. Nothing in that filtered record describes an image, statue or symbol for a distinct pre-Christian figure under this name, and no archaeological find has been identified as one either.

What Would Settle It An archaeological find, a carved or cast object identifiable as a pre-Christian Kartlian sky or divinity figure, or a surviving pre-Christian textual witness independent of the later Christian chroniclers, either of which would show whether the word ever named a figure with a pictorial or sculptural tradition of its own.

Expertise Needed Kartvelian studies, Caucasian archaeology

Question posed in The Georgians (Lang), David Marshall Lang.

Open Guruvayur

Why It Is Open A Kerala High Court division bench found in July 2026 that Guruvayur Devaswom's annual accounts for the 2023-24, 2024-25 and 2025-26 financial years had not been finalized or filed for statutory audit, that no physical verification of its gold and silver offerings had occurred in 43 years, and that auditors had been denied the digital access needed to check its online transactions, so no current total income or revenue figure for the Devaswom could be confirmed.

What Would Settle It The finalized, audited annual accounts of Guruvayur Devaswom for 2023-24, 2024-25 and 2025-26, once filed and made public in compliance with the Kerala High Court's July 2026 order, or independent reporting that reads them once they exist.

Expertise Needed Kerala Devaswom administration and public finance, and investigative or legal journalism covering religious endowment governance in Kerala.

Question posed in Kerala High Court Issues Directions To Strengthen Audit, Financial Transparency In Guruvayur Devaswom (LiveLaw, 2026), K. Salma Jennath.

Open Suryavarman II

Why It Is Open Khmer royal inscriptions name Suryavarman II's posthumous title and record his military campaigns and his temple building at Angkor Wat, but as with other Khmer god-kings his personal birth is not part of the epigraphic record, which speaks in terms of reign and religious dedication rather than biography.

What Would Settle It A dated Khmer inscription naming Suryavarman II's age or birth before his accession, distinct from the reign and campaign dates his own inscriptions record.

Expertise Needed Khmer history, Angkorian epigraphy

Question posed in Suryavarman II (reference article), Wikipedia contributors.

Open Suryavarman II

Why It Is Open His biography is generally treated by historians as beginning with his violent seizure of the throne in 1113, since nothing reliable is known of his origin or early life; a Wikipedia infobox names Angkor, but its own body text and citation do not support this as a birth record.

What Would Settle It An inscription or contemporary record naming his birthplace, independent of the assumption that a king born to rule at Angkor was born there.

Expertise Needed Khmer history; Angkorian epigraphy

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

Open Lily

Why It Is Open The Greek krinon is a general word for a showy flower rather than a botanical name. Anemone coronaria is the most commonly proposed candidate on grounds of what actually grows abundantly and conspicuously in Galilean fields, but Lilium candidum and several others remain in the running and the text gives no distinguishing detail.

What Would Settle It Nothing in the text can settle it; the question would move only on evidence about which flowers were locally called krinon in first-century Galilean usage.

Expertise Needed Koine Greek lexicography and Levantine field botany.

Question posed in Plants in the New Testament, Terry B. Ball, Entry for lily.

Open The Donatist-Catholic Conflict and Circumcellion Violence (312 to 411 CE)

Why It Is Open Augustine's letters and sermons, the fullest surviving contemporary source, name individual incidents of circumcellion violence and its Catholic reprisals but never attempt a running total across the century of intermittent conflict, and no other ancient writer or modern historian has reconstructed one from the surviving legal and ecclesiastical record.

What Would Settle It A systematic collation of every named incident across Augustine's correspondence, sermons and the acts of North African church councils, of the kind that could at least establish a documented floor even without a claim to completeness.

Expertise Needed Late antique church history; patristic source criticism

Question posed in Sacred Violence: African Christians and Sectarian Hatred in the Age of Augustine, Brent D. Shaw.

Open White Lotus War

Why It Is Open The figure most often repeated, roughly one hundred thousand rebel dead, circulates in general reference works without a traceable scholarly derivation, and no historian, including Dai's recent archival study, has reconciled it against Qing military records or attempted to add the civilian toll of the pacification campaign's scorched earth tactics and the famine that followed in its wake.

What Would Settle It A study working systematically from surviving Qing provincial and military archives, of the kind Dai draws on for the campaign's administrative history, extended specifically to build a reconciled casualty count across both combatant and civilian deaths for the war's full eight years.

Expertise Needed Late imperial Chinese history; Qing administrative and military archives

Question posed in The White Lotus War: Rebellion and Suppression in Late Imperial China, Yingcong Dai.

Open Hundred Years War

Why It Is Open Jonathan Sumption's multi volume scholarly history covers the war's campaigns in detail, and named battle losses are documented, thousands of French dead at Crecy, Poitiers and Agincourt among them, but no historian's synthesis totals combat deaths together with the compounding effects of famine and the Black Death across the war's hundred and sixteen year span into one figure. Totals near two to three million, or as high as five million, circulate widely but trace to popular compilations rather than a named historian's stated methodology.

What Would Settle It A named historian's stated total distinguishing direct battle deaths from indirect famine and plague mortality across the war's full span, comparable to the demographic methods used for other wars this atlas records. No such study was located; only unattributed aggregator totals circulate.

Expertise Needed Late medieval English and French military and demographic history.

Question posed in The Hundred Years War, Volume I: Trial by Battle, Jonathan Sumption.

Open Dungan Revolt (1862 to 1877)

Why It Is Open Population-history reconstructions for Shaanxi and Gansu document a catastrophic regional population collapse across 1862 to 1877, but no historian has separated deaths directly caused by combat and massacre from the era's simultaneous famine, disease and mass flight, and Chu's political and military study of the revolt's course does not attempt a casualty count at all.

What Would Settle It A demographic study working from surviving Qing provincial and local gazetteer population records across Shaanxi, Gansu and Ningxia, applying a consistent method capable of separating war and massacre deaths from the period's independently documented famine and plague mortality.

Expertise Needed Late Qing history; historical demography

Question posed in The Moslem Rebellion in Northwest China, 1862 to 1878: A Study of Government Minority Policy, Wen-djang Chu.

Open Donatus Magnus

Why It Is Open No source gives a birth year. His exile in 347 is documented in the imperial and conciliar record, but the death is placed around 355 only by later writers arguing against his church, and no burial place is recorded. The standard reference works print both dates as approximations.

What Would Settle It An African or Gallic epigraphic or documentary find naming him with a date, or an unremarked notice in the conciliar and imperial correspondence of the 350s.

Expertise Needed Late Roman prosopography and North African epigraphy

Question posed in The Donatist Church: A Movement of Protest in Roman North Africa, W. H. C. Frend.