Open Questions

Open Matsyendranath

Why It Is Open Matsyendranath survives only in Nath and Kaula tradition and in Newar devotional practice, and different lineages and modern scholars place him across several centuries with no external, independently datable evidence to settle the question.

What Would Settle It An inscription, manuscript colophon or external record independently naming Matsyendranath and a date, distinct from the devotional and lineage traditions that presently supply the only accounts of his life.

Expertise Needed History of tantra and hatha yoga, Nath Sampradaya studies, Newar religious history

Question posed in The Alchemical Body: Siddha Traditions in Medieval India, David Gordon White.

Open Sunan Kalijaga

Why It Is Open Sunan Kalijaga is known only through Javanese chronicle and hagiographic tradition centuries removed from his life, and even the popularly repeated 1450 birth year and 1513 death year are not agreed, with some accounts giving a death year decades later.

What Would Settle It A contemporary Javanese court chronicle, inscription or other independently datable record naming Sunan Kalijaga's birth or death, distinct from the popular hagiographic tradition that presently supplies the only dates in circulation.

Expertise Needed Javanese history, history of Islam in Indonesia

Question posed in Gamelan: Cultural Interaction and Musical Development in Central Java, Sumarsam.

Open Haji Bektash Veli

Why It Is Open Haji Bektash Veli's life is known only through Bektashi hagiography composed generations after him, and even the commonly repeated 1209 to 1271 dates compete with other traditional accounts that differ by decades on both ends.

What Would Settle It A thirteenth century Anatolian source, inscription or administrative record naming Haji Bektash Veli and a date, independent of the later Bektashi hagiographic tradition that presently supplies the only accounts of his life.

Expertise Needed History of Sufism, Ottoman and Anatolian history

Question posed in The Sufi Orders in Islam, J. Spencer Trimingham.

Open Sultan Sahak

Why It Is Open Sultan Sahak's life is remembered through Yarsani devotional narrative rather than documented biography, and the Kalam-e Saranjam's own Perdiwari texts do not supply datable historical reference points; scholarship's own fifteenth century placement is explicitly provisional, and other readings diverge by centuries.

What Would Settle It An external historical or archaeological record from the Hawraman region independently datable and naming Sultan Sahak, distinct from the devotional Kalam-e Saranjam tradition that presently supplies the only accounts of his life.

Expertise Needed History of the Yarsan/Ahl-e Haqq tradition, Kurdish history

Question posed in The Yaresan: A Sociological, Historical and Religio-Historical Study of a Kurdish Community, M. Reza Hamzeh'ee.

Open Robert Wang

Why It Is Open Wang's own published autobiography, and every other source located, describe his career as an artist and esoteric scholar, from his occult studies at seventeen through his collaboration with Israel Regardie on the Golden Dawn Tarot, in real detail, but none states a birth year or birthplace.

What Would Settle It A statement from Wang himself, or a publisher's biographical note, or public records research naming his birth year and place.

Expertise Needed Biography; history of modern tarot and Western esotericism

Question posed in Autobiography of Robert Wang, Creator of the Jungian Tarot Deck (Zero Equals Two!), Robert Wang.

Open Ezana of Aksum

Why It Is Open Aksum has left no king list, annals or dated document for the fourth century. The reign is placed in the middle of the century only by inference: the sequence in which his coin types appear, the order of his stone inscriptions, and the single external synchronism of the letter from Constantius II preserved in Athanasius, which itself carries no year. No birth or death date is recorded at all, and published reign estimates differ by more than a decade at either end.

What Would Settle It A dated Aksumite document naming the king, a securely dated external record synchronising his reign with a fixed event, or a scientifically dated archaeological deposit stratified against the coin sequence, for example radiocarbon dates from a closed context containing both his pre-Christian and Christian issues.

Expertise Needed Aksumite archaeology and numismatics; Ge'ez and Sabaean epigraphy; late Roman documentary history

Question posed in Ancient Churches of Ethiopia: Fourth-Fourteenth Centuries, David W. Phillipson.

Open Gebre Meskel

Why It Is Open The Aksumite state left no king list, no annals and no dated administrative document for the sixth century. Kaleb can be placed in the 520s only through external synchronisms with the Himyar campaign, and his successors are known chiefly from coin types whose relative order is clearer than their absolute dates. Ethiopian regnal traditions assign Gebre Meskel a long reign, but those traditions are hagiographic compilations of a much later period and give figures that cannot be checked against anything. No published estimate rests on evidence rather than on the same tradition restated.

What Would Settle It A dated Aksumite inscription or document naming him, an external synchronism placing his reign against a fixed event in Byzantine, Sasanian or south Arabian record, or a scientifically dated archaeological deposit stratified against his coin issues, for example radiocarbon or archaeomagnetic dates from a closed context containing coinage of the post-Kaleb sequence.

Expertise Needed Aksumite archaeology and numismatics; Geez and Sabaean epigraphy; Byzantine and south Arabian documentary history

Question posed in Ancient Churches of Ethiopia: Fourth-Fourteenth Centuries, David W. Phillipson.

Open Azu Ⰰ

Why It Is Open No manuscript survives from the Moravian mission itself. The oldest Glagolitic codices are tenth and eleventh century copies made a century or more after the alphabet was made, and they differ among themselves in which letters they carry and in what order they list them. Scholars do not hold opposing positions on the original inventory, because there is nothing to hold a position against: the question is left open for want of a ninth century witness rather than argued between camps. The letters this atlas records for Glagolitic follow the order and inventory of the surviving tradition as the Unicode Standard arranges it, which is the best available reconstruction and not the ninth century original.

What Would Settle It A ninth century Glagolitic witness, whether a codex, a fragment, a palimpsest under-text or a dated inscription, carrying an abecedary or enough continuous text to establish which letters were in use during the mission itself. Palimpsest recovery by multispectral imaging of the surviving early codices is the most likely route, since several of them are known to overlie earlier writing.

Expertise Needed Slavic palaeography; codicology; multispectral imaging of palimpsests

Question posed in Byzantine Missions Among the Slavs: SS. Constantine-Cyril and Methodius, Francis Dvornik.

Open Uncle

Why It Is Open Lilly's catalogue of the sixth house names uncles and aunts on the father's side directly, and turning the chart from the fourth produces the same answer independently, but which of the two came first is not established here. The step may be a Hellenistic inheritance, an Arabic development, or a Latin systematisation, and the atlas has found no study that settles it. The answer matters because every derived reading of an extended relative inherits whatever assignment the parent's house is given.

What Would Settle It A textual comparison across the Hellenistic, Arabic and Latin house literature, identifying the earliest passage that derives a collateral relative from a parent house rather than simply listing that relative among a house catalogue, and dating the transmission of that step.

Expertise Needed History of astrology; Arabic and Latin manuscript studies; history of the exact sciences

Question posed in A History of Horoscopic Astrology, James Herschel Holden.

Open Vishtaspa

Why It Is Open Nothing outside Zoroastrian tradition attests him. The traditional dating, which places Zarathustra 258 years before Alexander, appears to derive from an ancient confusion between this Vishtaspa and Hystaspes the father of Darius I, who is a different and later man. Linguistic dating of the Gathas places their composition many centuries earlier, in the second or very early first millennium BCE, somewhere in eastern Iran or Central Asia, which leaves the patron with no fixed place, date or external record.

What Would Settle It An epigraphic, archival or archaeological find naming Vishtaspa in a datable eastern Iranian or Central Asian context, or a decisive advance in the absolute dating of Old Avestan.

Expertise Needed Iranian philology; Central Asian archaeology; Avestan studies

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

Open Dhu Nuwas

Why It Is Open The Sabaic inscriptions of his reign stop at the Aksumite conquest, the Syriac accounts of the killings at Najran do not describe his end, and the story in which he rides his horse into the sea rather than be taken appears only in much later Arabic narrative. The reference literature reports the death as approximate for exactly this reason.

What Would Settle It A dated south Arabian inscription from the period of the Aksumite takeover that names the outcome, or an early Aksumite, Syriac or Byzantine notice of the campaign that reports how the Himyari king was disposed of.

Expertise Needed South Arabian epigraphy, Ethiopic and Syriac historiography

Question posed in The Throne of Adulis: Red Sea Wars on the Eve of Islam, G. W. Bowersock.

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 Brahmi Old Tamil Llla 𑀵

Why It Is Open The conventional account places the earliest Tamil-Brahmi cave inscriptions of Tamil Nadu several centuries before the common era, on palaeographic grounds and by comparison with the Ashokan material. Excavations at sites in the region have since been read as supporting a considerably earlier beginning, on the basis of stratigraphy and of radiocarbon determinations from associated deposits rather than from the inscribed objects themselves. The two accounts rest on different kinds of evidence and there is no agreed method for weighing one against the other, so this is not a case of two camps reading one body of evidence in opposite ways; it is a case in which the date has not been established.

What Would Settle It Direct dating of the inscribed objects rather than of the deposits around them, together with a published stratigraphic account that ties an inscribed sherd securely to a dated layer, and an independent palaeographic sequence for the southern letters built from the southern material itself rather than calibrated against the northern hands.

Expertise Needed South Asian archaeology, radiocarbon dating and Tamil epigraphy

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

Open Svatmarama

Why It Is Open The Hatha Yoga Pradipika names no birthplace for its compiler, and no manuscript tradition or later Natha lineage record fills the gap independently of the text itself.

What Would Settle It A datable manuscript colophon, inscription, or external reference naming Svatmarama's origin, none of which is currently known.

Expertise Needed History of yoga, manuscript studies

Question posed in Roots of Yoga, James Mallinson and Mark Singleton (trans. and eds.).

Open Andrei Rublev

Why It Is Open Rublev enters the documentary record as an adult monk already at work in 1405; no earlier source records his birthplace or exact birth year.

What Would Settle It A monastic or chronicle record from before 1405 naming his origin, none of which has been identified.

Expertise Needed Byzantine and Russian art history, medieval Russian monastic records

Question posed in The Rublev Trinity: The Icon of the Trinity by the Monk-painter Andrei Rublev (Gabriel Bunge), Gabriel Bunge.

Open Rabban Shimon ben Gamliel II

Why It Is Open Rabbinic sources remember Rabban Shimon ben Gamliel II as a youth who escaped the massacre at Betar in 135 CE and later as Nasi at Usha, but no source names where he was born.

What Would Settle It A datable document naming his birthplace, independent of the Betar and Usha narratives that establish only his later life.

Expertise Needed Rabbinics, history of the Mishnaic period

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

Open Imran ibn Hittan

Why It Is Open The medieval biographical dictionaries and modern studies of his verse record his poetry and his Kharijite allegiance but consistently locate his activity rather than his birth.

What Would Settle It A biographical dictionary entry or manuscript colophon naming his birthplace specifically rather than his milieu of activity.

Expertise Needed Early Islamic history, Arabic literature

Question posed in Kharijites (Wikipedia), Wikipedia contributors.

Open Spurinna

Why It Is Open Suetonius and Cicero record Spurinna's warning to Caesar in detail down to the exact exchange on the Ides of March, but neither names his home city or region; "Etruscan-trained" is a profession and an ethnicity, not a place of origin, and nothing else of his life survives to supply one.

What Would Settle It An inscription, a further ancient text, or a modern prosopographical study of Etruscan haruspices that ties Spurinna to a specific Etruscan city, comparable to how other named haruspices of the period have been localized.

Expertise Needed Roman and Etruscan prosopography

Question posed in Suetonius, The Deified Julius (Divus Iulius), Gaius Suetonius Tranquillus.

Open Tutankhamun

Why It Is Open He is usually assumed to have been born at Akhetaten (Amarna), his father's court city, but this follows from an inference about his contested parentage rather than from a direct record; no inscription or administrative document names his birthplace.

What Would Settle It Resolution of his parentage (whether his father was Akhenaten or Smenkhkare) together with an inscription or administrative record placing his birth directly; neither currently exists.

Expertise Needed Egyptology; Amarna period studies; ancient DNA and mummy studies

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

Open Rylands Library Papyrus P52

Why It Is Open The fragment reached the John Rylands Library as part of a purchase of papyri from the Egyptian antiquities market in the early twentieth century, most likely acquired by the papyrologist Bernard Grenfell no later than 1920. No excavation record, findspot, or acquisition documentation naming the seller or the circumstances of discovery survives or was ever published, which is typical for papyri bought on the market rather than professionally excavated.

What Would Settle It Surviving acquisition correspondence or dealer records from the Rylands Library's early twentieth century papyrus purchases, if any exist and can be located, naming the seller and the material's reported findspot in Egypt.

Expertise Needed Papyrology, library archival history

Question posed in An Unpublished Fragment of the Fourth Gospel in the John Rylands Library, C. H. Roberts.