Open Questions

Open Tobacco

Why It Is Open Multiple archaeological finds across the Americas have been proposed as early evidence of tobacco use, but which specific, securely dated find or residue analysis is genuinely the earliest has not been confirmed here.

What Would Settle It A residue analysis study identifying nicotine biomarkers from a securely dated, named excavation, compared against other candidate early pipe finds.

Expertise Needed Archaeobotany, archaeochemistry

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

Open Saraswati (Ravi Varma)

Why It Is Open Retail and auction sources consulted give three different years for Ravi Varma's Saraswati, 1881, 1886 and 1896, and none of the sources consulted names a current institutional home for the original oil with confidence; a compiled hobbyist list places a differently dated version at a named museum, but this atlas could not corroborate that against a museum catalogue record.

What Would Settle It A museum or gallery catalogue record, an exhibition history, or a scholarly catalogue raisonne of Ravi Varma's work that fixes the painting's completion year and names its present custodian with documentary support.

Expertise Needed Art historical provenance research, South Asian art history

Question posed in Wikipedia, "Raja Ravi Varma", Wikipedia contributors.

Open Panchaloha

Why It Is Open The five-metal alloy is prescribed in the Shilpa Shastra textual tradition, but secondary accounts date the relevant texts anywhere from the fifth to the ninth century CE depending on the recension, with no single scholarly source consulted confident enough to cite for a precise date. The Chola dynasty, ninth to thirteenth century CE, is where panchaloha temple bronze casting is best documented and most celebrated, but that is its flowering rather than its documented beginning.

What Would Settle It A South Indian art history or Sanskrit textual scholarship source establishing when the specific Shilpa Shastra passages prescribing the five-metal alloy were composed, distinguishing that from the later Chola-era flowering of the practice.

Expertise Needed South Indian art history and Sanskrit textual scholarship

Question posed in Encyclopedia of Hinduism, Denise Cush, Catherine Robinson and Michael York (eds.).

Open James Ossuary

Why It Is Open The rest of the inscription is Lemaire's securely read and palaeographically dated first century text, but the final clause survives only through a chain of contested physical evidence: the Israel Antiquities Authority's 2003 committees read a difference in patina and letter depth at exactly that clause, Oded Golan's 2012 criminal trial ended in acquittal for want of proof rather than a finding that the clause is ancient, and subsequent patina and isotope analyses from scientists on both sides of the case read the same kind of physical evidence in opposite directions.

What Would Settle It A single non-destructive patina or isotope protocol agreed by laboratories on both sides of the dispute, run on samples taken from across the whole inscription rather than only the disputed clause, with the raw data and method published for independent review rather than each side re-reading data produced under its own protocol.

Expertise Needed Epigraphy; archaeometry; forensic materials science

Question posed in Burial Box of James the Brother of Jesus, Andre Lemaire.

Open Thomas Rudd

Why It Is Open The Harley, Sloane and Wellcome manuscripts attributed to Rudd carry no colophon naming his birth or death, and the attribution of the pairing scheme to him is itself questioned; nothing in the catalogued source establishes his life dates.

What Would Settle It A parish register, will, or dated professional record, a military engineering commission or a mathematical publication, identifying this Thomas Rudd distinctly from others of the same name, or a codicological study dating the Harley and Sloane manuscripts against a known biography.

Expertise Needed Manuscript studies, seventeenth century English biography

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

Open Ibn Mujahid

Why It Is Open The modern study of Ibn Mujahid's selection of the seven readers works from his writing and its later citation; it does not supply his own birth or death year, and no other catalogued source does either.

What Would Settle It A biographical dictionary entry from the classical Islamic biographical literature giving his dates, checked against the Kitab al-Sab'a's own internal dating to the early fourth century AH.

Expertise Needed Islamic intellectual history, Arabic biographical literature

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

Open Johann Kaspar Hechtel

Why It Is Open The source that documents Hechtel's 1799 death and the game's publication gives no birth year, and no other catalogued source supplies one.

What Would Settle It A Nuremberg civic or guild record identifying Hechtel's baptism or birth, of the kind that has dated other Nuremberg engravers and publishers of the period.

Expertise Needed German book and print history

Question posed in A Wicked Pack of Cards: The Origins of the Occult Tarot, Ronald Decker, Thierry Depaulis and Michael Dummett.

Open Brihat Parashara Hora Shastra

Why It Is Open The tradition attributes the text to the Vedic-age sage Parashara, but no surviving manuscript is reliably datable earlier than the medieval period, and the text shows internal evidence of compilation over time rather than single authorship.

What Would Settle It A critical, manuscript-stemma edition comparing the major recensions, dating their strata by internal astronomical references and cross-checking against securely dated citing texts such as the Phaladeepika.

Expertise Needed Indology / history of science (Sanskrit textual criticism)

Question posed in Brihat Parashara Hora Shastra, Sage Parashara (attributed).

Open Gayatri Hymn

Why It Is Open The hymn's placement in the family books, the oldest stratum of the Rig Veda, is secure on internal linguistic grounds. The absolute date of that stratum is not: proposed dates range across the whole second millennium BCE, and no inscription, datable artefact or external synchronism fixes any point in that range.

What Would Settle It A securely dated inscription, artefact or archaeological correlate that can be tied to the language or content of the family books, comparable to the role the Mitanni treaty plays in dating other early Indo-Iranian material, would anchor the range.

Expertise Needed Vedic philology, Indo-Iranian archaeology

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

Open Gayatri Mantra

Why It Is Open The Gayatri's placement in the family books, the oldest stratum of the Rig Veda, is secure on internal linguistic grounds. The absolute date of that stratum is not: proposed dates range across the whole second millennium BCE, and no inscription, datable artefact or external synchronism fixes any point in that range.

What Would Settle It A securely dated inscription, artefact or archaeological correlate that can be tied to the language or content of the family books, comparable to the role the Mitanni treaty plays in dating other early Indo-Iranian material, would anchor the range.

Expertise Needed Vedic philology, Indo-Iranian archaeology

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

Open Sudarium of Oviedo

Why It Is Open Radiocarbon testing of the cloth returned an approximate seventh century date, but the testing laboratory itself cautioned that oil contamination absorbed by the cloth could distort the result, so the date obtained has never been treated as reliable.

What Would Settle It A repeat radiocarbon dating using a sample cleaned of contaminant oils, of the kind used elsewhere to correct for similar contamination in aged relics.

Expertise Needed Archaeometry, radiocarbon dating

Question posed in The Oviedo Cloth, Mark Guscin.

Open Amarnath Cave

Why It Is Open The cave is named in the Nilamata Purana and in Kalhana's Rajatarangini, but neither text's date of composition is settled, so their references cannot fix how far back the site's veneration actually runs.

What Would Settle It A codicological or paleographic dating study of the manuscript traditions of the Nilamata Purana and the Rajatarangini, or an independently dated inscription or record naming the cave before the nineteenth century.

Expertise Needed Indology, manuscript studies, Sanskrit philology

Question posed in Encyclopedia of Hinduism, Denise Cush, Catherine Robinson and Michael York (eds.).

Open Saffron

Why It Is Open Recent genetic and iconographic evidence (Kazemi-Shahandashti et al. 2022) points to Bronze Age Greece, Crete and Santorini around 1700 BCE, anchored on Minoan fresco depictions and Crocus cartwrightianus genetics. Older scholarship long assumed an Iranian or Asia Minor origin instead, given saffron's overwhelming later importance in Persian culture and its trade-route common names; this atlas's own origin-region fact already records the question as debated among authorities, and the 2022 genetic study does not by itself settle a century-old debate.

What Would Settle It Further ancient-DNA or archaeobotanical sampling of Crocus material from Aegean, Anatolian and Iranian Bronze Age sites, and confirmation of whether Crocus cartwrightianus populations outside Attica also carry the ancestral genome the 2022 study used to anchor the Greek-origin claim.

Question posed in Ancient Artworks and Crocus Genetics Both Support Saffron's Origin in Early Greece, Seyyedeh-Sanam Kazemi-Shahandashti et al., Frontiers in Plant Science, 25 Feb 2022, doi:10.3389/fpls.2022.834416.

Open Sunan Kalijaga

Why It Is Open Everything told about him comes from Javanese babad and hagiographic literature composed two to four centuries after the period it describes, mostly at the courts of Surakarta and Yogyakarta. No dated inscription, no sixteenth-century Portuguese or Malay report, and no archival document has been securely connected to him. The result is not a disagreement between scholars but an absence: no defended set of dates exists to disagree about.

What Would Settle It A dated epigraphic find at Kadilangu or at the Demak mosque naming him would give the cycle a fixed point. So would an early European or Malay archival mention independent of the babad tradition. Failing either, a systematic codicological dating of the earliest babad manuscripts would at least establish when the figure took his present shape, which is a smaller but answerable question.

Expertise Needed Javanese philology and codicology; Islamic epigraphy of Java; early modern archival history of the Indonesian archipelago

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

Open Ahmad Yasavi

Why It Is Open No birth year is recorded anywhere, and the received death year rests on hagiographical sources written centuries after the life. Nobody argues for a particular birth year, because there is no evidence to argue from; the reference literature simply omits it.

What Would Settle It A twelfth or thirteenth century document, endowment record or inscription from Yasi, Sayram or Bukhara that names him with a date.

Expertise Needed Central Asian documentary history and Persian hagiography

Question posed in The Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd edition, P. Bearman, Th. Bianquis, C. E. Bosworth, E. van Donzel and W. P. Heinrichs (eds.).

Open Donatus Magnus

Why It Is Open No source gives a birth year. His exile in 347 is documented in the imperial and conciliar record, but the death is placed around 355 only by later writers arguing against his church, and no burial place is recorded. The standard reference works print both dates as approximations.

What Would Settle It An African or Gallic epigraphic or documentary find naming him with a date, or an unremarked notice in the conciliar and imperial correspondence of the 350s.

Expertise Needed Late Roman prosopography and North African epigraphy

Question posed in The Donatist Church: A Movement of Protest in Roman North Africa, W. H. C. Frend.

Open Thor's Hammer Pendant

Why It Is Open Effectively the entire corpus of around a thousand pendants falls in the ninth to eleventh centuries. That is also the conversion period, so the distribution is compatible both with an old practice becoming archaeologically visible and with a practice that begins as a response to Christian cross-wearing. No securely dated earlier example has been published, and no positive account of an earlier phase exists, so this is an evidential gap rather than a contest between established positions.

What Would Settle It A hammer pendant, or a mould for one, recovered from a securely dated context earlier than the ninth century, or a systematic re-examination and re-dating of the existing corpus establishing that no such context exists.

Expertise Needed Viking Age and Migration Period archaeology, with finds dating and metalwork typology

Question posed in Norse Mythology: A Guide to the Gods, Heroes, Rituals, and Beliefs, John Lindow.

Open Bighorn Medicine Wheel

Why It Is Open The structure is stone laid on the ground surface, so it carries no stratigraphy and cannot be dated directly. Cairns have been added to and rebuilt by users over an unknown period, and material recovered at the site has returned a wide spread of dates. Estimates in the literature run from a few centuries to several thousand years. The builders are equally open: the Plains nations now associated with the site did not all occupy the Bighorn country at the same time, and Crow, Cheyenne, Arapaho, Shoshone and Lakota traditions each connect the wheel to their own history.

What Would Settle It A securely associated context: a buried feature or datable deposit beneath an undisturbed part of the structure, excavated with the consent of the associated nations and dated on material demonstrably contemporary with construction rather than with later use.

Expertise Needed Archaeology, working with the associated Plains nations; archaeoastronomy for the alignment claims

Question posed in Astronomical Alignment of the Big Horn Medicine Wheel, John A. Eddy.

Open Beowulf

Why It Is Open The one manuscript is dated on palaeographic grounds to about 975 to 1025, and that date is not seriously contested. The date of composition is, and estimates have ranged across three centuries. Arguments from metre, from linguistic archaism, from the historical allusions and from the poem's Christian frame have each been made to carry the case and each has been answered. The atlas records the manuscript date as a date and the composition date as disputed, rather than choosing.

What Would Settle It A dating argument that does not depend on assumptions about the transmission it is trying to establish. Linguistic and metrical tests have been the most productive line, and a test whose result is independent of whether the poem was copied and modernised on its way to the surviving manuscript would settle far more than another reading of the historical allusions.

Expertise Needed Old English philology, historical linguistics and metrics, palaeography

Question posed in Klaeber's Beowulf and the Fight at Finnsburg, fourth edition, R. D. Fulk, Robert E. Bjork and John D. Niles (eds.).

Open Radiocarbon Dating of the Sudarium of Oviedo

Why It Is Open The published assay came with the laboratory's own caveat that oils absorbed over centuries of veneration could distort the measured age, and that caveat was never tested. No scholar holds a position on what a clean measurement would show, so this is a gap rather than a disagreement: the work was started, it reached no conclusion, and nobody resumed it.

What Would Settle It A repeat assay on material cleaned by a published decontamination protocol, run blind across more than one laboratory, with the sampling location on the cloth recorded. Independent characterisation of the absorbed organic contaminants would show how large a shift they are capable of producing, which is the part the original caveat left unquantified.

Expertise Needed Radiocarbon dating and archaeometry, with textile conservation science for the decontamination protocol.

Question posed in The Oviedo Cloth, Mark Guscin.