Open Questions

Open Peter Waldo

Why It Is Open Peter Waldo enters the record as a Lyon merchant who gave away his wealth and began preaching around 1173; nothing in the surviving medieval sources states when he was born.

What Would Settle It A Lyon municipal or ecclesiastical record naming Waldo's family and birth year, independent of the later Waldensian tradition's own accounts of his conversion.

Expertise Needed Medieval history, history of the Waldensian movement

Question posed in Peter Waldo (Wikipedia), Wikipedia contributors.

Open Reconquista

Why It Is Open Historians have never attempted a single aggregate casualty figure for the Reconquista: nearly eight centuries of intermittent campaigns, sieges and truces across several separate Christian kingdoms fighting several separate Muslim states, with no continuous or comparable record keeping across that whole span, make a single defensible total a different kind of undertaking than counting the dead of a bounded war fought at one time by two sides. A figure of seven million dead is nonetheless widely repeated in popular accounts, but it traces to no named historian, study or archival source, and Joseph O'Callaghan's scholarly history of the conflict's crusading and religious framing gives no aggregate total either.

What Would Settle It A historical demographer's attempt to build a period by period and kingdom by kingdom casualty accounting across the centuries long conflict, rather than the single figure a bounded war can be given.

Expertise Needed Medieval Iberian history; historical demography

Question posed in Reconquest and Crusade in Medieval Spain, Joseph F. O'Callaghan.

Open The Nizari-Seljuk Conflicts (1090 to 1194)

Why It Is Open The surviving chronicles, compiled generations after the events by dynasties hostile to the Nizaris, report figures for distinct episodes (assassinated officials, massacred communities, one city's casualties) rather than a single reconciled total, and modern historians including Lewis and Daftary have not synthesized them into an agreed toll for the century-long conflict.

What Would Settle It A systematic cross-check of the Persian chronicle tradition against surviving documentary and archaeological evidence from the Nizari strongholds and the Seljuk provinces, of the kind that could distinguish which reported episodes are independently corroborated from which are hostile chronicle embellishment.

Expertise Needed Medieval Islamic history; Persian and Arabic chronicle source criticism

Question posed in The Assassin Legends: Myths of the Ismailis, Farhad Daftary.

Open Bahya ibn Paquda

Why It Is Open The Encyclopaedia Judaica records only that Bahya ibn Paquda was active in the second half of the eleventh century in Zaragoza, exact dates not recorded, and no medieval document independent of his one surviving work fixes an actual birth year.

What Would Settle It A datable communal or legal document from Zaragoza naming Bahya ibn Paquda in his role as dayan, independent of the Duties of the Heart itself, fixing a year in his life.

Expertise Needed Medieval Jewish intellectual history

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

Open The Bahir (Book of Illumination)

Why It Is Open Scholem argued that the Bahir is an edited compilation rather than a single composition, and that some of its material is older than its Provencal setting and eastern in origin. He could not reconstruct what that material was or how it travelled, and neither has anyone since. The manuscript tradition begins after the book was already circulating in Languedoc, so there is no witness to the stage before editing.

What Would Settle It A manuscript or a citation predating the Provencal circulation, or a securely dated eastern text sharing the Bahir's distinctive images and its fragmentary form. Comparative work on the Gnostic and Merkavah parallels Scholem noted, done against dated witnesses rather than against reconstructions, would narrow it even without a new manuscript.

Expertise Needed Medieval Jewish intellectual history, Hebrew and Aramaic codicology, and the study of late antique Jewish esoteric literature

Question posed in Origins of the Kabbalah, Gershom Scholem, translated by Allan Arkush.

Open The Sworn Book of Honorius (Liber Juratus)

Why It Is Open The Sworn Book of Honorius names Honorius of Thebes as the magician who compiled it at the direction of an assembly of masters. No document outside the Liber Juratus tradition itself mentions such a person, no Theban connection is corroborated, and the framing assembly of eighty-nine masters reads as a legitimating device rather than a record. The name may belong to a real compiler, to a deliberate pseudonym, or to a confusion with one of the popes named Honorius, to whom a separate grimoire was later ascribed.

What Would Settle It A datable manuscript, charter, university record or inventory naming a magician of that name independently of the Sworn Book, or a codicological study of the surviving manuscript families that placed the attribution earlier or later than the text it introduces.

Expertise Needed Medieval Latin palaeography and codicology, with the history of learned magic.

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

Open The Raid on Somnath in 1026

Why It Is Open Turko-Persian chronicles written after the fact give a formulaic figure of tens of thousands killed defending the temple, which Thapar's historiographical study reads as a rhetorical convention repeated across several unrelated conquest narratives of the period rather than a count, and contemporary Sanskrit and Jain inscriptions from Saurashtra do not corroborate it or even mention the raid.

What Would Settle It Independent corroborating evidence from the Saurashtra region itself, archaeological or epigraphic, of a kind that is entirely absent from the record as it stands, or a named modern historian's reasoned estimate in place of the chronicle's formulaic figure.

Expertise Needed Medieval South Asian history; Indology; epigraphy

Question posed in Somanatha: The Many Voices of a History, Romila Thapar.

Open Jaguar

Why It Is Open The were-jaguar infant is one of the most frequent and unmistakable figures in Olmec sculpture, appearing across major sites from San Lorenzo to La Venta. The Olmec left no deciphered textual record explaining their iconography, so nothing establishes whether the figure depicts a mythic birth, a were-jaguar transformation, a ruler's supernatural parentage or something else. Proposed readings are informed guesses drawn from later Mesoamerican parallels rather than conclusions drawn from Olmec sources themselves.

What Would Settle It Decipherment of a securely dated Olmec or Epi-Olmec inscription that names or glosses the figure, or a controlled excavation context, an offering, a burial or a workshop, that ties a were-jaguar sculpture to an identifiable ritual practice.

Expertise Needed Mesoamerican archaeology, epigraphy

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

Open Feeling the Future

Why It Is Open Bem, Tressoldi, Rabeyron and Duggan report a small overall effect across ninety experiments and argue that bias-correction methods do not remove it. Critics answer that the correction methods available cannot distinguish a genuine small effect from a literature filtered by what got written up, particularly where many of the constituent studies were not pre-registered. The dispute is about the adequacy of the statistical tools, and it is live in the wider methodology literature and not only in parapsychology.

What Would Settle It A registered-report replication series of adequate power, with the analysis plan lodged in advance and a commitment to publish, run by laboratories on both sides.

Expertise Needed Meta-analytic methodology; statistics; experimental psychology

Question posed in Feeling the Future: A Meta-Analysis of 90 Experiments on the Anomalous Anticipation of Random Future Events, Daryl J. Bem, Patrizio Tressoldi, Thomas Rabeyron and Michael Duggan.

Open Sikh-Mughal Wars

Why It Is Open J.S. Grewal's standard modern history of the Sikhs, and other accessible surveys of the conflict, record casualty figures for individual battles and massacres, tens of thousands at the Battle of Bhilowal, thousands at Chhota Ghallughara, hundreds at the siege of Gurdaspur, but none totals them into a single figure for the roughly ninety year conflict, and no comprehensive scholarly count was located. A figure is never invented to fill that gap.

What Would Settle It A scholarly synthesis totaling documented losses across the conflict's 1621 to 1715 span, or a demographic study of Punjab's population comparable to the census based methods used for other early modern wars. No such synthesis was located across the standard modern histories of the conflict.

Expertise Needed Military and demographic history of Mughal India and early Sikh Punjab.

Question posed in J.S. Grewal, The Sikhs of the Punjab (New Cambridge History of India II.3), J. S. Grewal.

Open The Cultural Revolution

Why It Is Open The Cultural Revolution's suppression of Buddhism, Taoism, Islam, Confucianism and Christianity is well documented, but no historian has published a death toll isolating deaths caused specifically by anti-religious persecution from the campaign's much larger political death toll, itself estimated across a wide range by different historians.

What Would Settle It A study disaggregating Cultural Revolution-era deaths by the target's religious identity or role, comparable to the campaign-specific tallies that exist for other twentieth-century religious persecutions elsewhere in the atlas.

Expertise Needed Modern Chinese history

Question posed in Religion in China: Survival and Revival under Communist Rule, Fenggang Yang.

Open The 1955 Anti-Baha'i Campaign in Iran

Why It Is Open IHRDC's history of the campaign documents one dated mass killing, the Yazd massacre of 28 July 1955 with seven dead, alongside widespread but uncounted violence, coerced recantations and property destruction reported in cities across Iran during the same month long campaign. No human rights body or historian consulted has totaled that wider violence into a single nationwide death count for the 1955 campaign specifically, as distinct from the persecution's later, better documented decades.

What Would Settle It A dedicated historical accounting of the April to May 1955 campaign specifically, cross-checking Bahai community records, contemporary Iranian press and any surviving official records city by city, of the kind IHRDC and other human rights documentation projects have since built for later, better recorded periods of Bahai persecution in Iran.

Expertise Needed Modern Iranian history; human rights documentation

Open Nag Champa

Why It Is Open Nag Champa's origin is commonly attributed to a twentieth century Indian ashram or mission, but no specific, checkable, dated source for its first formulation has been located.

What Would Settle It A documented company or ashram history naming the specific date and maker of the first Nag Champa formulation, as opposed to a general or promotional claim.

Expertise Needed Modern religious and commercial history

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

Open 1953 Lahore (Punjab) Anti-Ahmadi Riots

Why It Is Open The Punjab government's own Court of Inquiry documented roughly twenty three deaths from military and police action, a figure drawn from official operational reports rather than a citywide casualty survey. Later accounts of the riots commonly cite a far higher toll approaching two thousand, but no version of that figure traced here names the study, archive or method behind it, and no historian has reconciled the two.

What Would Settle It A systematic reconstruction working from Lahore and Punjab hospital, police and municipal burial records for February to May 1953, of the kind that would let a historian check the widely repeated higher estimate against a documented count rather than against the Court of Inquiry's own operational figures alone.

Expertise Needed Modern South Asian and Pakistani history; historical demography

Question posed in Politics of Desecularization: Law and the Minority Question in Pakistan, Sadia Saeed.

Open 1969 Ahmedabad Riots

Why It Is Open The Reddy Commission of Inquiry's own report acknowledges its recorded figure of more than six hundred and sixty dead as an undercount, since many bodies were never retrieved in a condition allowing identification and some deaths were never formally reported to police; historians' higher estimates of one to two thousand are themselves not built from a systematic recount but from unofficial contemporary reports.

What Would Settle It A systematic archival study working from Ahmedabad hospital, mortuary and municipal burial records alongside contemporary press and community accounts, on the model of later Indian communal-violence casualty reconstructions, to produce one reconciled toll for the September 1969 riots.

Expertise Needed Modern South Asian history; historical demography

Question posed in Communalism and Sexual Violence in India: The Politics of Gender, Ethnicity and Conflict, Megha Kumar.

Open Armenian Chant (Sharakan)

Why It Is Open Khaz signs were written above Armenian chant texts from about the ninth century and grew steadily more elaborate, but they did not fix pitch and appear to have cued gestures a singer already knew. When that oral knowledge lapsed the signs stopped being readable. Komitas Vardapet worked on the problem for years without reaching a reading, and Robert At'ayan's systematic study did not produce an agreed decipherment. There is no camp to argue against; the work simply stopped.

What Would Settle It A manuscript pairing khaz with a notation whose values are known, or a securely dated source setting Armenian signs beside Byzantine ones for the same melody, would give the system the external check it has never had. Comparative work on the earliest strata, before the signs multiplied, may also be able to fix a small core of them.

Expertise Needed Musicology and Armenian palaeography

Question posed in The Armenian Neume System of Notation, Robert At'ayan.

Open Georgian Chant

Why It Is Open Georgian hymn books of the tenth century carry chant signs, but nobody can say what they instruct. Comparison against Byzantine notation has not produced a reading and the Georgian signs do not map onto it cleanly. The consequence is severe for the tradition: no medieval Georgian melody can be recovered, and everything sung today descends from transcriptions made from living singers nine hundred years later. Nobody holds a rival decipherment; the question has simply been left where it was.

What Would Settle It A Georgian manuscript giving the same chant in both neumes and a notation of known values, or a bilingual source setting Georgian signs beside Byzantine ones, would supply the external control the system lacks. Systematic comparison of the neume repertory across the surviving tenth century books may also isolate a small core of signs whose behaviour is regular enough to test.

Expertise Needed Musicology and Georgian palaeography

Question posed in The Transcription and Transmission of Georgian Liturgical Chant, John A. Graham.

Open Kenekuk

Why It Is Open Kenekuk enters the historical record as a religious reformer among the Kickapoo in the 1820s and is documented until his death in the 1852 smallpox epidemic; no source records when he was born.

What Would Settle It A missionary, trader or government record from before the 1820s naming Kenekuk and giving an age or birth year.

Expertise Needed Native American history, history of the Kickapoo removal era

Question posed in Kenekuk, the Kickapoo Prophet (Herring), Joseph B. Herring.

Open Eridu: the Temple of Enki

Why It Is Open The stack of temples is real and is cited everywhere as evidence of continuity, but continuity is an inference from the stack rather than something the stack demonstrates. The excavation belongs to the 1940s, its final report appeared decades later, and no radiocarbon series was run through the sequence. Whether the deposits between one temple and the next represent a few years or several centuries of abandonment is not recorded, and no one has argued the question either way for want of data.

What Would Settle It Re-excavation of a limited sounding through the sequence with modern stratigraphic recording, a radiocarbon series taken level by level, and micromorphological study of the intervening deposits for signs of abandonment surfaces. Any one of the three would narrow it; together they would settle it.

Expertise Needed Near Eastern archaeology, with stratigraphy, radiocarbon dating and geoarchaeological micromorphology.

Question posed in Gods, Demons and Symbols of Ancient Mesopotamia: An Illustrated Dictionary, Jeremy Black and Anthony Green.

Open The Eridu Temple Sequence

Why It Is Open The excavation belongs to the 1940s and its final report appeared decades later; the site has not been re-excavated with modern stratigraphic recording, and there is no published radiocarbon series running through the sequence.

What Would Settle It A new season of stratigraphic excavation at Tell Abu Shahrain, recorded to modern standards, with a published radiocarbon series tying the temple sequence to absolute dates.

Expertise Needed Near Eastern archaeology; archaeological science (radiocarbon dating)

Question posed in Eridu, Fuad Safar, Mohammad Ali Mustafa and Seton Lloyd.