Open Questions

Open Pe Ⱊ

Why It Is Open The letter is encoded in the Unicode Standard and appears in the abecedaria, the alphabet lists copied out as exercises or inscriptions, more often than in running text. The reference literature reads it as a form of p without establishing what distinguished it from the ordinary letter for that sound, and different sources place different numeral values in this part of the order. Nobody holds a position on the question, which is why the atlas records the letter with no numeral value rather than choosing among the values on offer. It is an unfilled gap and not an argument between camps.

What Would Settle It An attestation of the sign in running text, in a context where the word it writes can be identified, would settle the sound. A survey of every surviving Glagolitic abecedary, recording where this sign falls in the order and whether it is ever given a numeral value in the list, would settle whether it was counted as a letter of the alphabet or carried as a variant.

Expertise Needed Slavic palaeography; codicology; Old Church Slavonic philology

Question posed in The Unicode Standard, The Unicode Consortium.

Open Soma

Why It Is Open The Rigveda describes a mountain plant of stalks and shoots, never mentioning root, leaf, flower, seed or fruit, and never names it in identifying terms. The Brahmanas already prescribe substitutes, so the plant had passed out of reach inside the tradition itself. Fly agaric, ephedra and Syrian rue each have serious advocates and each faces an objection that has not been answered.

What Would Settle It Residue analysis of pressing stones, strainers or storage vessels from a securely dated Indo-Iranian ritual context, with the identification independently replicated. Earlier claims of ephedra in Central Asian Bronze Age vessels have not settled the matter, so replication rather than a single result is what is needed.

Expertise Needed Archaeobotany and residue chemistry, working with Vedic and Avestan philology

Question posed in Soma: Divine Mushroom of Immortality, R. Gordon Wasson.

Open Haoma

Why It Is Open The Zoroastrian ceremony has been performed continuously and uses ephedra, which is the strongest evidence anyone has in the whole soma and haoma question because it is a practice rather than a reconstruction. But continuity of a rite does not establish continuity of a species, and substitution is documented on the Vedic side of the same inherited tradition.

What Would Settle It Residue analysis of Iranian ritual vessels of Achaemenid date or earlier, compared against the ephedra of current practice.

Expertise Needed Archaeobotany with Avestan philology

Question posed in A History of Zoroastrianism, Mary Boyce.

Open Kykeon

Why It Is Open Wasson, Hofmann and Ruck proposed in 1978 that ergot on the barley was the agent. Critics hold that ergot as it grows is severely toxic and that no ancient technique for separating a psychoactive fraction has been demonstrated, and that fasting, darkness and staging account for the reported experience without pharmacology. The oath of silence means no participant account survives to test either reading against.

What Would Settle It Residue analysis of drinking vessels securely tied to the Eleusinian sanctuary and to the rite rather than to general sanctuary use, with independent replication.

Expertise Needed Archaeochemistry and classical archaeology

Question posed in The Road to Eleusis: Unveiling the Secret of the Mysteries, R. Gordon Wasson, Albert Hofmann and Carl A. P. Ruck.

Open The Identity of the Breastplate Leshem

Why It Is Open This investigation set out to identify the ninth breastplate stone and stopped without a conclusion, because every avenue it examined turned out to be inferential. The ancient versions disagree and none of them is independent of the others; comparison with neighbouring stone lists establishes what was available rather than what was meant; and etymology alone has not narrowed the four candidates. Nobody holds a defended position that a specialist could go and read against a rival one, so this is a gap rather than a disagreement.

What Would Settle It A securely dated use of leshem outside the two Exodus lists, in a Hebrew or closely related Northwest Semitic text, in a context that identifies a physical object. Failing that, a labelled or securely provenanced stone from a Second Temple period priestly context, or a decisive argument from Semitic cognates. Absent one of those, the honest answer is that the question may not be decidable on present evidence, and establishing that would itself be a result.

Expertise Needed Northwest Semitic philology, biblical archaeology and historical gemology

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

Open The Scapegoat Rite of Yom Kippur

Why It Is Open Mishnah tractate Yoma names a site east of Jerusalem and describes a cliff, a measured route and a series of stations along it, but the name is spelled differently across the manuscript traditions and no identification on the ground has been established. No candidate site has a scholarly case mounted for it, so this is an unfilled gap rather than a contested identification.

What Would Settle It A survey along the plausible routes east of Jerusalem for a cliff matching the described distance, together with the remains of the staged booths, could produce a candidate. A firmer reading of the place name from the better manuscript traditions would narrow the search before any fieldwork.

Expertise Needed Historical geography of Judaea, rabbinic manuscript studies, field archaeology

Question posed in The Mishnah, Anonymous (rabbinic compilers), Yoma.

Open Thysia (Greek Animal Sacrifice)

Why It Is Open Three positions are held simultaneously by serious scholars and none has displaced the others: the rite as the preserved structure of a hunting kill with its attendant guilt, the rite as a system of cooking and distribution that fixes the human place between gods and beasts, and a critique arguing that the tidy opposition between sacrifice eaten and sacrifice burned entire is a modern schematisation the evidence of hero cult does not support.

What Would Settle It This is not a question a single find will close. What moves it is the accumulation of excavated faunal assemblages from sanctuary deposits, which record what was actually burned and what was butchered and eaten, tested against the literary schema rather than read through it.

Expertise Needed Greek religion, zooarchaeology of sanctuary deposits

Question posed in Miasma: Pollution and Purification in Early Greek Religion, Robert Parker.

Open Hubert Pearce

Why It Is Open The parapsychological literature records his trial results to several decimal places and almost nothing about the man. This atlas could not verify a birth date, a death date, or any account of his later life from an accessible source, and records no dates at all rather than estimating them.

What Would Settle It Duke Divinity School enrolment and graduation records for the early 1930s, or the Rhine Research Center's own archive of laboratory correspondence, which would identify him well enough for ordinary genealogical work.

Expertise Needed Archival research; genealogy

Question posed in A Review of the Pearce-Pratt Distance Series of ESP Tests, J. B. Rhine and J. G. Pratt.

Open Asham (The Reparation Offering)

Why It Is Open No ancient source states the distinction in terms that decide the cases where both appear. The reparation offering covers both sanctuary property and private fraud compounded by a false oath, and no single principle proposed so far accounts for that pairing without strain.

What Would Settle It A comparative study of reparation terminology in the wider ancient Near Eastern legal and cultic corpora, set against the Priestly cases, would test whether the pairing is a Priestly innovation or an inherited category.

Expertise Needed Hebrew Bible philology, comparative ancient Near Eastern law

Question posed in Leviticus 1-16: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary, Jacob Milgrom.

Open Order of Nine Angles

Why It Is Open The identification most often made in print, with David Myatt, is denied by Myatt himself, and no independent documentary or forensic evidence establishes who wrote under the name. The order's early history is documented mainly through its own publications.

What Would Settle It A stylometric comparison of the earliest Anton Long texts against Myatt's other pseudonymous and signed writing, or documentary evidence such as publisher correspondence or internal order papers naming the author, would settle it.

Expertise Needed Textual and stylometric analysis; history of new religious movements

Question posed in Satanism: A Social History, Massimo Introvigne.

Open The Origin of Tituba of Salem Village

Why It Is Open The word carried a wide and shifting range in a Massachusetts court of the period, and the clerks who used it were not making an ethnographic determination. The reconstruction of an Arawak origin by way of Barbados rests on that word plus indirect household and shipping records, and no direct evidence of her birth or passage has been found.

What Would Settle It A study of how colonial Massachusetts clerks used the term across a large corpus of records in the same decades, set against any direct documentary trace of her arrival.

Expertise Needed Colonial American archival history; historical linguistics of legal and administrative usage

Question posed in Tituba, Reluctant Witch of Salem: Devilish Indians and Puritan Fantasies, Elaine G. Breslaw, Breslaw, Tituba, Reluctant Witch of Salem.

Open DNA Barcoding of Commercial Myrrh

Why It Is Open The result stands for the modern trade and does not reach the ancient question. No securely dated archaeological myrrh from any trade period has been analysed the same way.

What Would Settle It Genetic or chemical analysis of securely dated archaeological myrrh residue from a known trade-period context, compared against the modern reference barcodes.

Expertise Needed Archaeobotany; archaeological science

Question posed in Deciphering Insights into Commercial Myrrh Species Authenticity from the psbA-trnH Genetic Region, Changhong Cao, Wenting Zhong, Feng Gao, Ying Zhang, Zhiguo Ma, Hui Cao and Menghua Wu.

Open The Identification of Biblical Hyssop

Why It Is Open The identification is reached by inference from later regional usage rather than from an ancient botanical description, and no archaeobotanical remains from a ritual context have been identified to species.

What Would Settle It Archaeobotanical remains recovered from a securely dated ritual context and identified to species, or an ancient description precise enough to fix the referent independently of later regional usage.

Expertise Needed Biblical philology; archaeobotany

Question posed in Identification of Biblical Hyssop and Origin of the Traditional Use of Oregano-Group Herbs in the Mediterranean Region, Alexander Fleisher and Zhenia Fleisher.

Open Soma

Why It Is Open At least three serious candidates have been argued at length and none is established. Wasson proposed Amanita muscaria in 1968; Flattery and Schwartz proposed Peganum harmala in 1989; ephedra is favoured on the grounds that it is the plant used in the living Zoroastrian Yasna, a ritual with no recorded break. Each fits some of the textual evidence and fails on other parts of it.

What Would Settle It A securely dated archaeobotanical find from an Indo-Iranian ritual context with residue analysis, or a philological argument that settles the disputed Rig Veda passages. A fourth possibility deserves testing: that the hymns are liturgical praise rather than pharmacological description, in which case a mild plant is sufficient and the search for a potent one is misconceived.

Expertise Needed Indology, Iranian and Avestan philology, archaeobotany, ethnobotany

Question posed in Soma: Divine Mushroom of Immortality, R. Gordon Wasson.

Open Ligure

Why It Is Open No securely dated ancient Hebrew source uses leshem outside the Exodus breastplate list in a context that fixes what stone it names, so every proposed identification, jacinth, amber, tourmaline or opal, rests on inference rather than direct attestation. The Septuagint, the Vulgate and the later translation tradition do not agree on a referent for this ninth breastplate stone either, which is the visible symptom of the unsettled identification.

What Would Settle It An independently attested, securely dated use of leshem in a non-biblical ancient Hebrew or closely related Northwest Semitic inscription or document, ideally alongside a described or surviving physical object, would let philologists cross-check the word against a known referent. A securely provenanced, labeled exemplar from a Second Temple period priestly context would serve the same purpose.

Expertise Needed Northwest Semitic philology, biblical archaeology and historical mineralogy

Question posed in The Holy Bible, Anonymous (multiple authors).

Open Upsilon ⲩ

Why It Is Open Coptic renamed several of the Greek letters, and this atlas uses the Coptic names where they are settled: ei for epsilon, laula for lambda, ou for omicron, semma for sigma. For upsilon the authorities disagree. Scholarly grammars of the Sahidic dialect record one Coptic form, alphabet charts in ordinary Coptic Orthodox use commonly print another, and the run that seeded these rows could not establish which had the better claim without asserting something it had not checked. The Greek name is used in the meantime as a neutral label.

What Would Settle It A survey of the letter names given in the principal Coptic grammars alongside the names taught in Coptic Orthodox church schools in Egypt and the diaspora, distinguishing the scholarly Sahidic tradition from living Bohairic practice, and saying which name belongs to which tradition rather than choosing one for both.

Expertise Needed Coptology; Coptic Orthodox liturgical practice

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

Open Hyssop

Why It Is Open The Hebrew ezov is rendered hyssop by long translation convention, but Hyssopus officinalis is not native to the southern Levant and does not match the plant's described uses. Origanum syriacum, Syrian oregano, fits the ecology and the ritual use better and is the leading candidate, but the identification rests on inference rather than on any ancient description precise enough to settle it.

What Would Settle It A botanical description in an ancient source specific enough to exclude the alternatives, or archaeobotanical remains from a ritual context that can be identified to species.

Expertise Needed Botany and Biblical Hebrew philology together. Neither field settles it alone, which is why it has stayed open.

Question posed in Identification of Biblical Hyssop and Origin of the Traditional Use of Oregano-Group Herbs in the Mediterranean Region, Alexander Fleisher and Zhenia Fleisher, Volume 42, pages 232 to 241.

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 Myrrh

Why It Is Open Myrrh is traded and described across the ancient world as one commodity, but the genus has several resin-producing species and the ancient sources do not distinguish them. A genetic study of commercial myrrh found only a small proportion of samples matching the pharmacopoeia species, so even the modern trade is not one thing.

What Would Settle It Species-level identification of resin residues from a securely dated archaeological context, ideally from more than one trade period.

Expertise Needed Botany, archaeobotany, and the economic history of the incense routes.

Question posed in Deciphering Insights into Commercial Myrrh Species Authenticity from the psbA-trnH Genetic Region, Changhong Cao, Wenting Zhong, Feng Gao, Ying Zhang, Zhiguo Ma, Hui Cao and Menghua Wu, Article e0320731, results on species identification.

Open Soma Sacrifice

Why It Is Open The Rig Veda describes soma's habitat, preparation and effects, but the living tradition lost the plant before the late Vedic period, when the ritual texts already prescribe substitutes. Two centuries of proposals (ephedra, fly agaric, Syrian rue, and others, including Wasson's 1968 book-length fly agaric case) each fit some verses and fail others, and no candidate has won consensus.

What Would Settle It Archaeobotanical residue analysis from an early Vedic or BMAC-context ritual vessel with identifiable plant remains, or a decisive phytochemical match between the full Rigvedic description and a candidate species in its Indo-Iranian range.

Expertise Needed Archaeobotany and Vedic philology

Question posed in The Rigveda: The Earliest Religious Poetry of India, Stephanie W. Jamison and Joel P. Brereton, Introduction, on soma and its identification.