Divinity Atlas

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Things this atlas does not know. Each entry is a question that specialists have posed and not settled, recorded with what would actually resolve it and which expertise the answer needs.

These are kept deliberately, rather than quietly omitted. An atlas that shows only what it is sure of implies a confidence it has not earned, and the gaps are often where the interesting work is. Several sit exactly where two fields fail to meet: identifying the hyssop of the Hebrew Bible needs a botanist and a philologist of Biblical Hebrew, and neither one settles it alone.

You can send evidence on some of these. A pilot is open on 55 questions in one field, Palaeography. Each says what would resolve it; send something that meets that bar, with a source anybody can check, and an editor will weigh it. Sending evidence does not guarantee the question will be resolved, and it does not have to be your field to read what is being asked. See what is open.

Grouped by the shape of the gap rather than its subject: what sort of thing is unresolved.

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Showing 221 to 240 of 610 open questions, page 12 of 31.

attribution 58

Who said or wrote or made something, where the record is incomplete.

Theban T T Where does the Theban sign for T come from, and does Trithemius's ascription of the script to Honorius of Thebes rest on anything but his own word?

Open Theban T T

Why It Is Open The three attributed-author facts recorded on Theban T are all marked unknown, and this is the question they leave open. Trithemius published the script in Polygraphiae libri sex in 1518, crediting Honorius of Thebes on the authority of Pietro d'Abano, but the credit has never been corroborated. The ascription is not known to appear in any writing attributed to d'Abano, the script is not known to appear in any manuscript of Honorius except British Library Sloane 3853, which names Agrippa as its own source, and no publication before 1518 has been found to carry it. A Trithemius era invention is widely assumed but has never been demonstrated, and no rival candidate has ever been named, which is why this is unknown rather than debated. It is one question about the whole Theban script rather than about this letter alone, and it is recorded on each of the twenty six letters because the atlas stores the attribution separately for every letter.

What Would Settle It A codicological survey of pre-1518 manuscripts in the ars notoria and Solomonic grimoire traditions for any script matching the Theban letterforms, together with archival work on Trithemius's own circle, including his students and correspondents such as Agrippa, and a collation of the Polygraphiae chart against the earliest surviving impressions. One dated witness earlier than 1518 would settle the priority; a draft, a letter or a working paper would settle the authorship.

Expertise Needed Palaeography and codicology of late medieval Latin manuscripts, history of the early modern printed book, history of Renaissance occultism

Codicology History of Renaissance Occultism History of the Book Palaeography

Question posed in Theban alphabet (reference article), Wikipedia contributors, Origin and attribution: the ascription is not known to be mentioned in any writing attributed to Pietro d'Abano, nor the script in any Honorius manuscript except Sloane 3853, which names Agrippa..

Theban U U Where does the Theban sign for U come from, and does Trithemius's ascription of the script to Honorius of Thebes rest on anything but his own word?

Open Theban U U

Why It Is Open The three attributed-author facts recorded on Theban U are all marked unknown, and this is the question they leave open. Trithemius published the script in Polygraphiae libri sex in 1518, crediting Honorius of Thebes on the authority of Pietro d'Abano, but the credit has never been corroborated. The ascription is not known to appear in any writing attributed to d'Abano, the script is not known to appear in any manuscript of Honorius except British Library Sloane 3853, which names Agrippa as its own source, and no publication before 1518 has been found to carry it. A Trithemius era invention is widely assumed but has never been demonstrated, and no rival candidate has ever been named, which is why this is unknown rather than debated. It is one question about the whole Theban script rather than about this letter alone, and it is recorded on each of the twenty six letters because the atlas stores the attribution separately for every letter.

Expertise Needed Palaeography and codicology of late medieval Latin manuscripts, history of the early modern printed book, history of Renaissance occultism

Codicology History of Renaissance Occultism History of the Book Palaeography

Theban V V Where does the Theban sign for V come from, and does Trithemius's ascription of the script to Honorius of Thebes rest on anything but his own word?

Open Theban V V

Why It Is Open The three attributed-author facts recorded on Theban V are all marked unknown, and this is the question they leave open. Trithemius published the script in Polygraphiae libri sex in 1518, crediting Honorius of Thebes on the authority of Pietro d'Abano, but the credit has never been corroborated. The ascription is not known to appear in any writing attributed to d'Abano, the script is not known to appear in any manuscript of Honorius except British Library Sloane 3853, which names Agrippa as its own source, and no publication before 1518 has been found to carry it. A Trithemius era invention is widely assumed but has never been demonstrated, and no rival candidate has ever been named, which is why this is unknown rather than debated. It is one question about the whole Theban script rather than about this letter alone, and it is recorded on each of the twenty six letters because the atlas stores the attribution separately for every letter.

Expertise Needed Palaeography and codicology of late medieval Latin manuscripts, history of the early modern printed book, history of Renaissance occultism

Codicology History of Renaissance Occultism History of the Book Palaeography

Theban W W Where does the Theban sign for W come from, and does Trithemius's ascription of the script to Honorius of Thebes rest on anything but his own word?

Open Theban W W

Why It Is Open The three attributed-author facts recorded on Theban W are all marked unknown, and this is the question they leave open. Trithemius published the script in Polygraphiae libri sex in 1518, crediting Honorius of Thebes on the authority of Pietro d'Abano, but the credit has never been corroborated. The ascription is not known to appear in any writing attributed to d'Abano, the script is not known to appear in any manuscript of Honorius except British Library Sloane 3853, which names Agrippa as its own source, and no publication before 1518 has been found to carry it. A Trithemius era invention is widely assumed but has never been demonstrated, and no rival candidate has ever been named, which is why this is unknown rather than debated. It is one question about the whole Theban script rather than about this letter alone, and it is recorded on each of the twenty six letters because the atlas stores the attribution separately for every letter.

Expertise Needed Palaeography and codicology of late medieval Latin manuscripts, history of the early modern printed book, history of Renaissance occultism

Codicology History of Renaissance Occultism History of the Book Palaeography

Theban X X Where does the Theban sign for X come from, and does Trithemius's ascription of the script to Honorius of Thebes rest on anything but his own word?

Open Theban X X

Why It Is Open The three attributed-author facts recorded on Theban X are all marked unknown, and this is the question they leave open. Trithemius published the script in Polygraphiae libri sex in 1518, crediting Honorius of Thebes on the authority of Pietro d'Abano, but the credit has never been corroborated. The ascription is not known to appear in any writing attributed to d'Abano, the script is not known to appear in any manuscript of Honorius except British Library Sloane 3853, which names Agrippa as its own source, and no publication before 1518 has been found to carry it. A Trithemius era invention is widely assumed but has never been demonstrated, and no rival candidate has ever been named, which is why this is unknown rather than debated. It is one question about the whole Theban script rather than about this letter alone, and it is recorded on each of the twenty six letters because the atlas stores the attribution separately for every letter.

Expertise Needed Palaeography and codicology of late medieval Latin manuscripts, history of the early modern printed book, history of Renaissance occultism

Codicology History of Renaissance Occultism History of the Book Palaeography

Theban Y Y Where does the Theban sign for Y come from, and does Trithemius's ascription of the script to Honorius of Thebes rest on anything but his own word?

Open Theban Y Y

Why It Is Open The three attributed-author facts recorded on Theban Y are all marked unknown, and this is the question they leave open. Trithemius published the script in Polygraphiae libri sex in 1518, crediting Honorius of Thebes on the authority of Pietro d'Abano, but the credit has never been corroborated. The ascription is not known to appear in any writing attributed to d'Abano, the script is not known to appear in any manuscript of Honorius except British Library Sloane 3853, which names Agrippa as its own source, and no publication before 1518 has been found to carry it. A Trithemius era invention is widely assumed but has never been demonstrated, and no rival candidate has ever been named, which is why this is unknown rather than debated. It is one question about the whole Theban script rather than about this letter alone, and it is recorded on each of the twenty six letters because the atlas stores the attribution separately for every letter.

Expertise Needed Palaeography and codicology of late medieval Latin manuscripts, history of the early modern printed book, history of Renaissance occultism

Codicology History of Renaissance Occultism History of the Book Palaeography

Theban Z Z Where does the Theban sign for Z come from, and does Trithemius's ascription of the script to Honorius of Thebes rest on anything but his own word?

Open Theban Z Z

Why It Is Open The three attributed-author facts recorded on Theban Z are all marked unknown, and this is the question they leave open. Trithemius published the script in Polygraphiae libri sex in 1518, crediting Honorius of Thebes on the authority of Pietro d'Abano, but the credit has never been corroborated. The ascription is not known to appear in any writing attributed to d'Abano, the script is not known to appear in any manuscript of Honorius except British Library Sloane 3853, which names Agrippa as its own source, and no publication before 1518 has been found to carry it. A Trithemius era invention is widely assumed but has never been demonstrated, and no rival candidate has ever been named, which is why this is unknown rather than debated. It is one question about the whole Theban script rather than about this letter alone, and it is recorded on each of the twenty six letters because the atlas stores the attribution separately for every letter.

Expertise Needed Palaeography and codicology of late medieval Latin manuscripts, history of the early modern printed book, history of Renaissance occultism

Codicology History of Renaissance Occultism History of the Book Palaeography

identification 54

Which thing an old name actually refers to.

Wallace Fard Muhammad Where Was Wallace Fard Muhammad Born, and Who Was He Before 1930?

Open Wallace Fard Muhammad

Why It Is Open He is the founding figure of the Nation of Islam, a movement with millions of adherents across its history, and no document has been produced that establishes who he was before he appeared in Detroit around 1930. Historians, journalists and the FBI have each proposed different identities and origins for him, and none commands consensus.

What Would Settle It A birth, immigration, employment or court record naming him under a documented pre-1930 identity, corroborated independently of the competing candidate identities already proposed by investigators and journalists.

Expertise Needed American religious history; archival and genealogical research; journalism and investigative history

Question posed in The Nation of Islam: An American Millenarian Movement, Martha F. Lee.

Epistle to Diognetus Who wrote the Epistle to Diognetus, and when?

Open Epistle to Diognetus

Why It Is Open No ancient writer names or quotes the letter before its single surviving manuscript resurfaces in the thirteenth century, and the letter itself names no author. Its polished rhetorical style differs from the rest of the apostolic fathers collection it is conventionally grouped with, and proposed authors and dates spanning the second and third centuries all rest on style and apparent theological concern rather than direct evidence.

What Would Settle It An independent ancient citation or manuscript witness naming the author or firmly dating the text would settle this; absent that, a scholarly consensus reconciling its style and content with a known apologetic writer's other work would narrow the range.

Expertise Needed Patristics and early Christian textual studies

Question posed in The Apostolic Fathers: Greek Texts and English Translations (Michael W. Holmes), Michael W. Holmes, editor and translator.

Menog-i Khrad (Spirit of Wisdom) Who compiled the Menog-i Khrad, and can it be dated more precisely than the broad Sasanian-to-early-Islamic span?

Open Menog-i Khrad (Spirit of Wisdom)

Why It Is Open The text names no individual author or compiler and, like most surviving Pahlavi andarz literature, is transmitted as an anonymous product of the Zoroastrian priesthood. Its manuscript tradition post-dates its composition by centuries, leaving both authorship and a precise date unrecoverable from the text itself.

What Would Settle It An independent contemporary Sasanian or early Islamic-era reference naming the text or its compiler would settle this; absent that, a philological study placing its Pahlavi against securely dated Pahlavi texts could narrow the range.

Expertise Needed Iranian philology and Zoroastrian textual studies

Question posed in Pahlavi Texts, Part III: Dina-i Mainog-i Khirad (E.W. West), E.W. West, translator.

Arda Viraf Nameh (Book of Arda Viraf) Who composed the Arda Viraf Nameh, and how much of the surviving text reflects its Sasanian-era narrative setting rather than later redaction?

Open Arda Viraf Nameh (Book of Arda Viraf)

Why It Is Open The text is framed as a first-person report of Viraf's own journey rather than a work with a credited literary author, and no compiler is named in the surviving manuscript tradition, which itself postdates the narrative's dramatic setting by an uncertain span.

What Would Settle It An independent contemporary or near-contemporary Sasanian or early Islamic-era reference to the text or its compiler would help settle authorship; a philological study distinguishing linguistic strata within the surviving Pahlavi could help separate earlier from later material.

Expertise Needed Iranian philology and Zoroastrian textual studies

Question posed in The Book of Arda Viraf (Martin Haug and E.W. West), Martin Haug and E.W. West, translators, with Dastur Hoshangji Jamaspji Asa.

Sefer HaRazim (Book of the Mysteries) Who compiled Sefer HaRazim, and can its date be fixed more precisely within the late antique period?

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.

Benzoin When does a securely dated source first name Sumatran benzoin specifically, distinct from the resin storax?

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.).

Dragon's Blood Which classical passages naming cinnabaris refer to dragon's blood resin rather than the mineral cinnabar?

Open Dragon's Blood

Why It Is Open Pliny and other classical writers use cinnabaris for both the red resin later called dragon's blood and, separately, the mineral cinnabar, mercury sulfide, and scholars disagree over which passages refer to which substance.

What Would Settle It A study disentangling the classical vocabulary for red resins and red minerals, establishing which passages securely name the Socotran dragon tree resin.

Expertise Needed Classical philology, history of pharmacology

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

Storax Does the Hebrew Bible's tsori, usually translated balm, denote storax or a different resin?

Open Storax

Why It Is Open Genesis 37:25 and other passages mention tsori, translated balm, among trade goods, but scholarly identification of tsori is divided between storax, mastic gum and other resins, so it cannot honestly be cited as storax's own earliest attestation without settling that identification.

What Would Settle It A study settling the botanical identification of the Hebrew term tsori among its candidate resins.

Expertise Needed Biblical philology, archaeobotany

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

Mata Khivi What were Mata Khivi's actual birth and death years?

Open Mata Khivi

Why It Is Open The Guru Granth Sahib, her strongest attestation, records no dates for her at all. The secondary Sikh reference literature that does venture birth and death years disagrees with itself, and no independent Mughal-era or Sikh documentary record has settled the question either way. The sixteenth-century placement usually given rests on her documented contemporaneity with Guru Angad's tenure as Guru from 1539 to 1552, not on a dated record of her own life.

What Would Settle It An independent contemporary or near-contemporary Sikh or Mughal-era record naming a specific year for her birth or her death would settle this. Absent that, a scholarly reconciliation of the secondary sources' disagreement, explaining which figures are more reliable and why, would at least narrow the range presently offered.

Expertise Needed Sikh history and textual studies

Question posed in The Sikh Religion: Its Gurus, Sacred Writings and Authors, vol. 1, Max Arthur Macauliffe.

Purvas Did the lost Purvas genuinely preserve Mahavira's own teaching, as Jain tradition holds?

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.

Nazca What language did the Nazca people themselves speak?

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

Archaeology Historical Linguistics

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

S2 What is the thirtieth Ugaritic sign, S2, actually for?

Open S2

Why It Is Open The sign appears at the tail of the longer Ugaritic school abecedaries, written a second time after the twenty-ninth sign, and its shape is conventionally described as samekh-like. No Ugaritic source names it, and specialists disagree on its basic function: some read it as an additional native sibilant the ordinary twenty-nine signs did not distinguish, others treat it chiefly as a device for spelling words of foreign origin. No other script modelled in this atlas offers even an approximate cognate to compare it against, unlike Ugaritic's other five signs unique among its Northwest Semitic peers, all five of which correspond cleanly to a preserved Arabic letter.

What Would Settle It A systematic survey of every attested occurrence of the sign in the Ugaritic textual corpus, not only the abecedaries, checked for whether it clusters in loanwords or foreign personal and place names, which would support the spelling-device reading, against whether it appears in ordinary native vocabulary in a way the standard twenty-nine signs could not otherwise write, which would support a distinct native phoneme.

Expertise Needed Ugaritology; Northwest Semitic historical phonology

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

Blessed Mantle of the Prophet Does the cloak preserved in the Chamber of the Sacred Relics at Topkapi Palace genuinely belong to the Prophet Muhammad?

Open Blessed Mantle of the Prophet

Why It Is Open Identification rests on tradition and unbroken custody. The textile has never been radiocarbon dated or otherwise scientifically tested.

What Would Settle It Radiocarbon dating and textile fiber analysis of the cloak, if the Topkapi Palace Museum ever permitted sampling.

Expertise Needed Textile archaeometry, Islamic studies

Archaeometry Islamic Studies

Question posed in Chamber of the Sacred Relics, Topkapi Palace Museum, Istanbul.

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