Open Questions

Open Wilton Diptych

Why It Is Open The panel carries no signature and no surviving documentary record names its painter; art historians disagree over whether the artist was English or French (or Franco-Flemish) trained, a debate more than a century old and still unresolved.

What Would Settle It A documentary record from Richard II's own household accounts naming a payment to a specific painter, or a technical or stylistic match confidently linking the panel to another securely attributed work from the same workshop.

Expertise Needed Medieval English and French art history

Question posed in Wilton Diptych (Wikipedia), Wikipedia contributors.

Open Ajanta Cave Paintings

Why It Is Open No inscription anywhere in the thirty caves names an individual painter or workshop; the paintings span roughly seven centuries and two distinct building phases, almost certainly the work of many different hands whose identities were never recorded or have not survived.

What Would Settle It A donor or workshop inscription not yet identified among the site's epigraphy, or a stylistic study confidently grouping specific caves to a named or datable workshop tradition documented elsewhere in the Vakataka or earlier period.

Expertise Needed South Asian art history, epigraphy

Question posed in Ajanta Caves, Paintings (Wikipedia), Wikipedia contributors.

Open Presentism

Why It Is Open Essentialism, Interactionism and Nominalism, the three sibling metaphysical positions filled in the same pass, each name one historical figure as principal proponent directly in their own text (Aristotle, Descartes, Ockham). Presentism's own text sets out the position and its objections in the same style but names nobody as having first defended or best defended it.

What Would Settle It A citable history-of-philosophy source identifying the position's clearest or earliest defender, whether an ancient or medieval figure arguing from ordinary intuition about the reality of the present, or a modern one such as the logicians who built formal tense logic specifically to defend it.

Expertise Needed History of philosophy

Question posed in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Edward N. Zalta and Uri Nodelman (eds.).

Open Americas

Why It Is Open Ptolemy's four quarters divide only the oikoumene, the inhabited world known in the second century, and the western hemisphere lies wholly outside it. No quarter, triplicity or planetary co-ruler was ever assigned to the Americas by the tradition that built the scheme, and nothing proposed since has acquired comparable standing. This is not a lost passage or a disputed reading; it is an absence created by the geographic horizon of the source.

What Would Settle It A survey of the mundane astrological literature from the sixteenth century onward, when the Americas entered European awareness, establishing whether any author extended the chorography to the new hemisphere, on what reasoning, and whether the extension was taken up by anyone else. A negative result would settle the entry as firmly as a positive one, and either way the entry ceases to be an open absence.

Expertise Needed History of astrology; early modern intellectual history; history of geographic knowledge

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

Open Zi Wei Dou Shu

Why It Is Open The system is traditionally ascribed to the Daoist adept Chen Tuan, c. 871-989, but the attribution cannot be verified against any surviving text from his lifetime, and the earliest manuscripts describing the method postdate him by centuries.

What Would Settle It A textual historical study tracing the earliest surviving Zi Wei Dou Shu manuscripts and comparing their content and terminology against securely dated Chen Tuan texts.

Expertise Needed Sinology; history of Chinese astrology; textual criticism

Question posed in Chinese Mathematical Astrology: Reaching Out to the Stars, Ho Peng Yoke.

Open Avestan A 𐬀

Why It Is Open The script is placed in Sasanian Iran with reasonable confidence and its purpose is not in doubt, but no source names the person or the body that designed it. This is not a case of scholars holding rival candidates; there are no candidates. The work was begun and left without a conclusion.

What Would Settle It A Sasanian or early post-Sasanian text, a colophon in an early manuscript, or an inscription that names the deviser or the commissioning authority. Failing that, a comparative study of the earliest surviving Avestan hands against dated Pahlavi material, which might at least narrow the milieu.

Expertise Needed Iranian philology and Zoroastrian manuscript studies

Question posed in The World's Writing Systems, Peter T. Daniels and William Bright (eds.).

Open Slovo Ⱄ

Why It Is Open The first twenty letter names are ordinary Slavonic words and read together as connected clauses, from azu buky vede, I know letters, through ritsi slovo tvrido, say the word firmly. That much is not in question. What is in question is what follows from it. One position holds that the names were chosen deliberately so that the recitation of the alphabet would itself be an utterance, a piece of design in keeping with an alphabet made for the reading of scripture. Another holds that the names are largely inherited mnemonic words, that the sense of the sequence is a reading imposed later, and that the point is settled against composition by the fact that the names stop meaning anything at all from the twenty third letter onward. Both positions are held and both can be read.

What Would Settle It A ninth or tenth century source that gives the letter names in full as a continuous text, rather than as a list, would show the sequence being read as an utterance at a date close to the alphabet's making. The acrostic alphabet poems of the Old Church Slavonic tradition, which arrange the letters in verse, are the most likely place for such evidence, and a study that separated what those poems inherit from what they compose would bear directly on the question.

Expertise Needed Old Church Slavonic philology; Slavic historical linguistics; medieval Slavonic literature

Question posed in The World's Writing Systems, Peter T. Daniels and William Bright (eds.).

Open Uruk: the Eanna Precinct

Why It Is Open Inanna holds Eanna throughout the historical period and there is no doubt about that. The earliest monumental levels are several centuries older than any readable statement of dedication. The tablets recovered from them are accounts and word lists, the buildings carry no dedicatory inscription, and no foundation deposit naming a recipient has been found. The usual identification is an inference backward from later certainty, and no scholar has argued a rival case, because there is nothing to argue from.

What Would Settle It A dedicatory inscription, a foundation deposit or an archaic text from the Uruk V or IV levels that names the recipient of the buildings. Failing that, a decisive advance in reading the non-administrative part of the proto-cuneiform corpus, which would let the archaic lists be read as statements rather than inventories.

Expertise Needed Assyriology and proto-cuneiform palaeography, working with Near Eastern archaeology of the fourth millennium BCE.

Question posed in Ancient Mesopotamian Gods and Goddesses, Nicole Brisch (ed.).

Open Thealogy

Why It Is Open The word is variously credited to different writers of the 1970s and this pass could not establish a first attested use from a source it had checked. Goldenberg's use in 1979 is documented; earlier uses are asserted in secondary literature without a locus.

What Would Settle It A first-attestation search across feminist religious periodicals and conference papers of the 1970s, giving a dated printed occurrence with page reference.

Expertise Needed History of religions; lexicography

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

Open Enochian Calls

Why It Is Open Secondary sources agree the sixteen calls between the two general openers and the Aethyr call work the four Elemental Watchtowers (earth, water, air, fire), but they disagree on the exact call-by-call assignment, and some later schemes (Golden Dawn) elaborate a finer subdivision (24 sub-angles) that is a 19th century systematization rather than Dee's own division. c2-esoterica declined to assign a specific element to any of the sixteen individual calls on 2026-07-27 rather than pick one scheme and present it as settled.

What Would Settle It A direct reading of the relevant Sloane manuscript folios (the calls proper, distinct from Sloane 3191's Heptarchia material) cross checked against Casaubon's 1659 print, or a specialist secondary source that states its own call-by-call table and its manuscript basis explicitly.

Expertise Needed Early modern manuscript studies / history of Renaissance magic

Question posed in A True and Faithful Relation of What Passed for Many Years Between Dr. John Dee and Some Spirits, John Dee, edited by Meric Casaubon.

Open De Heptarchia Mystica

Why It Is Open The 2026-07-26 discovery and buildout design documents estimated 49 HeptarchicRoyalty rows for this table. Peterson's edition of Sloane MS 3191 and the parallel full text edition on archive.org name only fourteen individuals: the seven Heptarchical Kings and their seven Princes, one pair per day of the week. Each Prince is also described with a retinue of forty two attendant ministers, but the manuscript identifies these by table position or letter rather than by proper name, so seeding them as Name rows would mean inventing names Dee never gave them. c2-esoterica seeded the fourteen verified Kings and Princes on 2026-07-27 and left this gap open rather than closing it with fabricated rows.

What Would Settle It A closer reading of the full Sloane 3191 folios, or a scholarly edition that resolves whether the forty two ministers per prince carry individual names anywhere in Dee's working papers, or whether the 49 estimate instead conflated the Heptarchia with a different Enochian roster (the ninety one Aethyr governors, or the Watchtower angels) that has its own separate naming scheme.

Expertise Needed Early modern manuscript studies / history of Renaissance magic

Question posed in De Heptarchia Mystica (Sloane MS 3191), Joseph H. Peterson's edition, John Dee, edited by Joseph H. Peterson.

Open Axion Estin

Why It Is Open Athonite monastic tradition credits the text to a tenth century revelation to a monk at Karyes, but that account is devotional legend, not a documented event, and no independent manuscript or historical source establishes the hymns actual date or author.

What Would Settle It A dated manuscript witness to the text earlier than, or independent of, the Athonite legend, or a specialist study of Byzantine Marian hymnography that traces the hymns transmission history on textual rather than legendary grounds.

Expertise Needed Byzantine liturgical history; hymnography

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

Open Ginans

Why It Is Open Ginans are attributed to named pirs of the Satpanth mission, but the surviving Khojki manuscripts are considerably later than the men they name, the corpus went on growing after those men had died, and an attribution in this tradition asserts lineage and authority as well as composition. Scholars therefore treat the ascriptions as traditional rather than as established, without being able to say which texts are early.

What Would Settle It Systematic dating of the Khojki manuscript collections, and linguistic analysis of the corpus against securely dated South Asian texts of the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries, would let the earlier strata be separated from the later. The manuscripts were catalogued only in the twentieth century and much of that comparative work has not been done.

Expertise Needed Manuscript studies, South Asian historical linguistics and Ismaili studies

Question posed in Songs of Wisdom and Circles of Dance: Hymns of the Satpanth Ismaili Muslim Saint, Pir Shams, Tazim R. Kassam.

Open Serer Religion

Why It Is Open This is a gap rather than an argument. The monument fields at Sine-Ngayene, Wanar, Wassu and Kerbatch, inscribed by UNESCO in 2006, were built over a long span and have been partially excavated, but no excavator has been able to attach them to a named present-day people, and no scholar has published a positive attribution to defend. Serer oral tradition, recorded most fully by Henry Gravrand, connects the monuments to Serer forebears and reads the burials as those of ancestors who are now among the pangool. Historians have neither confirmed that reading nor produced a rival one; they have set it aside as unproven and moved on, which leaves the question with no position holding the field.

What Would Settle It A dated burial and ceramic sequence from a securely stratified excavation across several of the monument fields, combined with ancient DNA from the tumuli burials and comparison against present-day Serer, Wolof and Mandinka populations. Radiocarbon coverage of the circles is thin and unevenly published, and no aDNA programme has been directed at the Senegambian monuments. Community consultation with Serer authorities would need to precede any sampling.

Expertise Needed West African archaeology; archaeogenetics; Senegambian oral history and its evaluation as a historical source.

Question posed in Stone Circles of Senegambia, UNESCO World Heritage List, UNESCO World Heritage Committee.

Open Gurmukhi

Why It Is Open Sikh tradition credits Guru Angad with the script, while historians of Indic writing hold that the letterforms were already in mercantile use in the Landa hands. Both accounts are argued from the same thin evidence, and the atlas records the disagreement rather than settling it. What neither account establishes for this pass is whether the specific ordering of the thirty-five, including the placement of Sassa and Haha ahead of the five series, predates the Gurus or was fixed by them.

What Would Settle It Dated Landa or proto-Gurmukhi material with an explicit letter sequence, whether a scribal exercise, an account book heading or an inscription, from before the middle of the sixteenth century. A published palaeographic study of the ordering itself, as distinct from the letterforms, would also close it.

Expertise Needed Indic palaeography and the history of writing in the Punjab

Question posed in The World's Writing Systems, Peter T. Daniels and William Bright (eds.).

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.

Open Picatrix (Ghayat al-Hakim)

Why It Is Open The Picatrix has long circulated under the name of Maslama al-Majriti, the Andalusi mathematician and astronomer who died in the early eleventh century. The ascription has been challenged in favour of Maslama ibn Qasim al-Qurtubi, a different Andalusi scholar of overlapping name and period with a documented interest in the occult sciences. The atlas records the attribution as it circulates and does not treat either identification as settled.

What Would Settle It A comparative study of the Arabic Ghayat against the securely attributed works of each candidate, on vocabulary, sources cited and technical practice, or a manuscript colophon earlier than the ones currently known.

Expertise Needed Classical Arabic philology and the history of science in al-Andalus.

Question posed in Picatrix: A Medieval Treatise on Astral Magic, Dan Attrell and David Porreca (trans.).

Open 57

Why It Is Open The anecdote is very widely told and 57 is called the Grothendieck prime because of it. Its literal veracity is disputed within mathematical folklore, and the tellings do not agree on the setting or the wording.

What Would Settle It A first-hand account from someone present, or a contemporary written record of the exchange.

Expertise Needed History of mathematics, and oral history of the Grothendieck circle.

Question posed in Comme Appele du Neant, As If Summoned from the Void: The Life of Alexandre Grothendieck, Allyn Jackson, Part 2, page 1196.

Open Gallium

Why It Is Open The discoverer gave the patriotic reason, that he had named the element for Gallia, the Latin name for France. The coincidence that gallus is Latin for a rooster, and that his own surname, Lecoq, is French for the rooster, was pointed out at once and has been repeated ever since. Whether the second reading was intended, quietly enjoyed, or only ever imagined by other people cannot be settled from the naming announcement, which offers the patriotic reason alone.

What Would Settle It A statement of intent in Lecoq de Boisbaudran's own correspondence or working papers. Failing that, the question concerns a private intention and may simply not be answerable.

Expertise Needed History of chemistry, and French archival work on the Lecoq de Boisbaudran papers.

Question posed in Periodic Table: Gallium, Royal Society of Chemistry, History section of the gallium entry.

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.