Open Questions

Open Sacred Tooth Relic of Kandy

Why It Is Open No independent scientific examination of the relic has ever been permitted. Its identification rests entirely on transmitted religious tradition, not on physical testing.

What Would Settle It Non-destructive material analysis, such as micro-CT or isotopic testing, of the relic, if Sri Dalada Maligawa ever permitted an outside examination.

Expertise Needed Archaeometry, Buddhist studies

Question posed in Sri Dalada Maligawa, The Temple of the Sacred Tooth Relic (official site), Sri Dalada Maligawa.

Open Tooth Relic of Lingguang Temple

Why It Is Open Attribution rests on transmitted tradition. The relic has not been independently examined.

What Would Settle It Non-destructive material analysis of the relic, if the custodial temple ever permitted an outside examination.

Expertise Needed Archaeometry, Buddhist studies

Question posed in Buddha Tooth Relic Stupa, Lingguang Temple (Visit Beijing official), Visit Beijing.

Open The Fourth Buddhist Council in Kashmir

Why It Is Open The accounts that name a place do not name the same one, they are all late, northern and secondary, and no site has ever been identified on the ground. Nobody defends a location, so this is a gap in the record rather than an argument between camps.

What Would Settle It An inscription naming the assembly, or the excavation of a monastic complex in Kashmir or the north-west of the subcontinent large enough to house it and carrying Sarvastivada Abhidharma material of the right date.

Expertise Needed South Asian archaeology and epigraphy, working with Buddhist studies

Question posed in History of Indian Buddhism: From the Origins to the Saka Era, Etienne Lamotte, translated by Sara Webb-Boin.

Open Sri Dalada Maligawa

Why It Is Open The temple permits only devotional access. No independent scientific examination of the relic has ever been permitted, so authenticity rests on transmitted tradition alone.

What Would Settle It Non-destructive material analysis of the relic, such as micro-CT or isotopic testing, if the temple ever permitted an outside examination.

Expertise Needed Archaeometry, Buddhist studies

Question posed in Sri Dalada Maligawa (institutional record).

Open Perth Museum (Culture Perth and Kinross)

Why It Is Open No documentary or physical evidence has ever settled whether monks at Scone hid the genuine stone and gave Edward I a substitute in 1296. The question has never been resolved.

What Would Settle It Discovery of a contemporary thirteenth or fourteenth century record describing the 1296 removal in enough detail to confirm or rule out a substitution, or a comparative petrological study against any stone independently documented as being at Scone before 1296.

Expertise Needed Medieval history, geology

Question posed in Perth Museum (institutional record).

Open The Mithras Liturgy

Why It Is Open Dieterich identified it as a Mithraic initiation script in 1903 and Cumont rejected the identification, and no evidence has appeared since that settles it either way. The text carries a Mithraic name and solar imagery; it carries none of the iconographic programme that defines Mithraism in its archaeology, and it carries the Graeco-Egyptian magical vocabulary that Mithraic material does not.

What Would Settle It A Mithraic ritual text of independent provenance, from a Mithraeum or another controlled context, against which the passage could be compared. No such text is currently known, which is why the passage was treated as decisive in the first place.

Expertise Needed History of ancient religion, Mithraic studies, papyrology

Question posed in The Mithras Liturgy: Text, Translation, and Commentary, Hans Dieter Betz.

Open The Nine Herbs Charm

Why It Is Open Old English plant names do not correspond one to one with modern species, and the medical manuscripts are not consistent with each other. Mucgwyrt, wegbrade, fille and finule can be identified with reasonable confidence. Maegde and attorlathe have proposals that have not been accepted. Stune and wergulu have no identification that anyone defends, and nobody holds a position on them, so the question is an unfilled gap rather than a live argument. Every attempt to read the charm as pharmacology stops here.

What Would Settle It A glossary witness pairing one of the unidentified Old English names with a Latin plant name, which is how the secure identifications were made. Failing that, archaeobotanical evidence from a securely dated Anglo-Saxon medical or monastic context, where the plant assemblage could be compared against the list. A systematic re-search of the Old English glossaries and of the English place-name corpus for the elements stune and wergulu, using material catalogued since the standard identifications were made, is the concrete next step.

Expertise Needed Old English lexicography, historical botany and archaeobotany

Question posed in Leechdoms, Wortcunning and Starcraft of Early England, Oswald Cockayne.

Open Onycha

Why It Is Open The Hebrew shecheleth of Exodus 30:34 is rendered onycha, fingernail, in the Septuagint. The leading identification is the operculum of a marine gastropod, which fits the sense, a nail-like hard plate, and the ancient aromatics trade. Benzoin, labdanum and rockrose are proposed plant alternatives but fit neither the sense nor the trade as well. A non-kosher animal product in the sacred incense is a live halakhic difficulty, which is the main reason the operculum identification is resisted by some commentators rather than for philological reasons. No reconstruction of the ketoret can be made without settling this, and it has not been settled.

What Would Settle It A residue analysis of an incense deposit from a securely dated Second Temple period altar or vessel, compared chemically against operculum keratin and against the candidate plant resins, would settle which substance was actually burned.

Expertise Needed Archaeochemistry, biblical studies

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

Open Sappa (Tza) ፀ

Why It Is Open In the received reading tradition of the Ethiopian and Eritrean churches sappa is sounded exactly as saday is, so the classical value is not recoverable from how the script is read today, and it is reconstructed by comparison with the other Semitic languages rather than from any Ethiopian testimony.

What Would Settle It A transcription of Ge'ez words into a contemporary script that did distinguish the sounds, or an Aksumite-period bilingual or transcribed text in which the letter's value can be read off directly.

Expertise Needed Semitic historical linguistics; Ethiopian epigraphy

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

Open Raphael

Why It Is Open Until 2026-07-30 the site tagged Raphael as an Islamic archangel on the strength of a shared name alone, not through evidence. That tag was not carried across when religion membership for archangels was later reviewed: the Islamic identification runs through Israfil, and the atlas holds nothing establishing that the two figures are one and the same. Raphael's own name-origin properties tie him to the Book of Tobit and note his absence from the Hebrew Bible. Recording the identification would have been a guess, so it was left out and the question written down instead.

What Would Settle It A survey of classical Islamic angelology, hadith collections and tafsir establishing whether Israfil is identified with Raphael inside the tradition itself rather than only in later comparative writing, together with the earliest datable text that makes the equation. A positive finding is one recorded link between Raphael and Islam, with that source attached. A negative finding closes this question as withdrawn.

Expertise Needed Islamic studies, comparative angelology, history of religions

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

Open The Sabians

Why It Is Open The Quran names the Sabians three times and gives no description of them. The two leading identifications, the Mandaeans of southern Iraq and the star-venerating people of Harran, rest on different kinds of evidence and point in different directions, and the Harranian case is complicated by a report that the name was adopted there in order to obtain protected status. The identification has been argued since the ninth century by parties with a legal interest in the answer.

What Would Settle It A securely dated pre-Islamic attestation of the name applied to a specific community, or documentary evidence of self-designation from either candidate group before the Abbasid period, would settle it. Failing that, a systematic comparison of the earliest Quranic commentaries against the Mandaean and Harranian source material could establish which identification the earliest readers actually held.

Expertise Needed Semitic philology, Quranic exegesis and its history, the archaeology and epigraphy of upper Mesopotamia, and Mandaean studies

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

Open Indus Valley

Why It Is Open The Indus script that labels these seals has never been deciphered, so the horned seated figure on seal M-304 and its kin cannot be read against a text that would say who or what it depicts. The proto-Shiva reading popularized in early twentieth century scholarship rests on visual resemblance to later Hindu iconography (the seated posture, the horns, the surrounding animals), not on any legible caption, and Srinivasan's own iconological re-assessment finds the identification unsupported by the seal's own details.

What Would Settle It A decipherment of the Indus script that survives scholarly scrutiny, or an independently datable bilingual inscription pairing Indus signs with a known language, would let the seals be read on their own terms rather than through later Vedic or Hindu iconography projected backward onto them.

Expertise Needed Indus Valley archaeology, epigraphy and comparative iconography

Question posed in The So-Called Proto-Siva Seal from Mohenjo-Daro: An Iconological Assessment, Doris Meth Srinivasan.

Open Movement for the Restoration of the Ten Commandments of God

Why It Is Open The commonly cited figure of about 778 dead is assembled from counts taken at the Kanungu church and several satellite grave sites, not from an identified register, and the victims at the satellite sites were killed over a period of months before the fire. Credonia Mwerinde and Joseph Kibwetere were sought and never produced. The Ugandan investigation was not completed, the remains were never comprehensively examined, and no identification exercise was carried out, so the total and the fate of the leadership are both unresolved rather than disputed.

What Would Settle It Forensic examination and DNA identification of the remains recovered from the Kanungu site and the satellite graves, matched against surviving relatives, together with release of the Ugandan police investigation file and the 2000 post-mortem records.

Expertise Needed Forensic anthropology and forensic genetics; Ugandan criminal records and archival research; history of religion in East Africa.

Question posed in World Religions and Spirituality Project, David G. Bromley (founding director) and the profile authors of record.

Open Amsha

Why It Is Open The Rigvedic name is amsa, a share, and it stands sixth in the hymn that lists the Adityas. The Vishnu Purana's list of twelve, which is explicitly solar and assigns one Aditya to each month, carries a name usually rendered Amshu, from amsu, a ray or a soma stalk. The Bhagavata Purana's list has neither. No source consulted for this entry argues the identification in either direction.

What Would Settle It A collation of the Aditya lists across the Puranic manuscript traditions, reading the name in each recension rather than in a single printed translation, and a comparison with the Brahmana passages where the count of twelve first appears.

Expertise Needed Sanskrit philology and Puranic textual criticism

Question posed in Vishnu Purana, Anonymous, Book II, chapter 10.

Open Vishvarupa

Why It Is Open Both are the ordinary Sanskrit compound meaning having all forms, and the atlas holds them as separate subjects sharing a word. Whether the epithet was ever felt to carry any of the older figure, or whether the coincidence is nothing more than a common adjective doing two jobs, has not been settled.

What Would Settle It A survey of the epithet in epic and Puranic usage checking for any passage that plays the two senses against each other, which would show the connection was felt, or its absence across the corpus, which would show it was not.

Expertise Needed Sanskrit literature and the history of Vaishnava epithets

Question posed in Vedic Mythology, Arthur Anthony Macdonell.

Open The Ashwini Kumaras

Why It Is Open The two twilights, the morning and evening star, the sun and the moon, day and night, and a pair of stars have all been proposed. The disagreement predates modern scholarship: Indian commentators were already recording rival opinions. No proposal has carried the field, and the hymns describe the twins by what they do rather than by what they are.

What Would Settle It Comparative evidence from the wider Indo-European divine twin material strong enough to fix a referent rather than a shared narrative pattern, or a Vedic passage that identifies the twins with a phenomenon rather than merely associating them with the dawn.

Expertise Needed Vedic philology and comparative Indo-European religion

Question posed in Vedic Mythology, Arthur Anthony Macdonell.

Open Aja Ekapada

Why It Is Open He has no hymn, no described act, no attribute and no epithet, and appears almost only inside enumerations of gods. Aja is either a goat or, read as a-ja, the unborn, and ekapada is one-footed or having one support. Readings were proposed in the nineteenth century and nobody has defended any of them at length since, because there is no passage anywhere against which one could be tested. This is a gap rather than a disagreement. He appears only in enumerations, almost always beside Ahi Budhnya, so no domain can be read off the surviving text either.

What Would Settle It A passage from outside the Rigveda that describes rather than merely names him, whether in the Brahmana literature, the Atharvaveda or a comparative Indo-Iranian source; or a demonstration that the formulaic pairing with Ahi Budhnya is itself the whole content of the name, which would close the question by showing there is nothing behind it. A comparative Indo-European study connecting the name to a documented mythic role would serve equally.

Expertise Needed Vedic philology and comparative Indo-Iranian religion

Question posed in Vedic Mythology, Arthur Anthony Macdonell.

Open Rama Prasad

Why It Is Open The scholarly literature the atlas cites treats him as a conduit for the tattvas rather than as a subject, and gives his publications without giving his life. No source consulted here supplies birth or death years, and the atlas has therefore recorded a period of activity in place of a lifespan rather than quote a date it cannot support.

What Would Settle It Theosophical Society membership registers and the Adyar archives, which record members' details, together with contemporary Indian periodical indexes, would establish the dates and probably the rest of the bibliography.

Expertise Needed History of the Theosophical movement, and archival work in Indian colonial-period periodicals

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

Open Dutty Boukman

Why It Is Open He is one of the most consequential individuals in Caribbean history and no document has been produced that establishes his origin. The suggestion of an anglophone Caribbean birth rests on a reading of his name and has never been tested against a record. Because he was enslaved, the paperwork that would ordinarily answer this, if it ever existed, was made by people with no interest in his identity.

What Would Settle It A plantation inventory, notarial act, baptismal entry or ship manifest naming him, from the archives of Saint-Domingue, Jamaica or the French colonial administration. Much of the relevant colonial notarial material survives in France and in Haiti and has not been searched systematically for this purpose.

Expertise Needed Caribbean archival history; Atlantic slave trade record linkage; onomastics

Question posed in Voodoo in Haiti, Alfred Metraux.

Open The Sethian Curse Tablets of Rome

Why It Is Open The atlas records this page's language as Latin, which renders as a language chip. The standard scholarly description of the group Wunsch published in 1898, the tablets from a columbarium on the Via Appia, reports it as largely Greek, with the charioteers, horses and factions carrying Latin names. The two statements cannot both be right, and no page-level citation for either has been located yet. The neighbouring British tablets, Bath and Uley, are correctly Latin, which is probably how the value arrived here.

What Would Settle It A language census of the tablets in Richard Wunsch, Sethianische Verfluchungstafeln aus Rom, Leipzig 1898, counting the edited texts by script and noting any Latin written in Greek letters. The edition is public domain and already catalogued in this atlas. R. S. Conway reviewed it in the Classical Review 13.4, May 1899, pages 224 to 226. Audollent, Defixionum Tabellae, 1904, also catalogued here, carries further tablets of the class and would corroborate. If the group is genuinely bilingual, the finding is not a corrected language value but that a single recorded language cannot describe this page, and that is the more useful result.

Expertise Needed Epigraphy and the papyrology of the Greek magical corpus

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