Open Questions

Open Diti

Why It Is Open Diti is named only a handful of times in the Rigveda, always in formulaic proximity to Aditi, with no hymn, no epithet and no story of her own. A figure of that antiquity with that little attached to her is unusual, and her full career begins only when the Puranic genealogists need two mothers.

What Would Settle It Comparative Indo-Iranian evidence for an independent figure behind the abstract noun, or a demonstration that the Vedic occurrences are all secondary to the divine name Aditi.

Expertise Needed Vedic philology and comparative Indo-Iranian linguistics

Question posed in Vedic Mythology, Arthur Anthony Macdonell.

Open Kashyapa

Why It Is Open The identification is old and attractive, because the tortoise is a creation figure elsewhere in the same literature and a progenitor who is also a tortoise would join two strands neatly. The two may equally be homonyms, and a resemblance that suits a later theology is the kind of thing a later theology can produce.

What Would Settle It Comparative evidence from cognate Indo-Iranian vocabulary, or a demonstration that the tortoise sense is attested for the name before the Prajapati tortoise material that makes it attractive.

Expertise Needed Sanskrit etymology and comparative Indo-Iranian linguistics

Question posed in Vedic Mythology, Arthur Anthony Macdonell.

Open Nahas (Na) ነ

Why It Is Open A few Ge'ez letter names are transparently words in the language: bet is a house, gaml is a camel, and the word behind res is the word for a head. Most are not, and several, nahas among them, resemble Ge'ez words closely enough to invite a gloss that nothing supports. The atlas records no meaning for those letters, which is a statement about the evidence and leaves open whether the Ethiopian tradition itself ever attached senses to them.

What Would Settle It A survey of the Ge'ez grammatical and church-school literature for any indigenous account of the letter names, set against the comparative reconstruction of the Northwest Semitic names, would show whether an Ethiopian gloss tradition exists and what it says.

Expertise Needed Ethiopian philology and the history of the traditional church schools

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

Open Chatat (The Purification Offering)

Why It Is Open The two readings derive the noun from different senses of the same verb stem, and the biblical text supports each in different passages. The offering is required where no wrong has been done, which favours the purification reading, but the same chapters use the ordinary language of forgiveness, which does not.

What Would Settle It This is a question of interpretation rather than of missing evidence, and it will not be closed by a discovery. What would advance it is a full account of the class that explains the childbirth and discharge cases and the forgiveness formulae together, rather than treating either group as residual.

Expertise Needed Hebrew Bible philology, Priestly source criticism

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

Open Nefertem

Why It Is Open The name is written nfr plus tm and both halves are ambiguous. It is read as "Atum is beautiful", making the god a statement about the creator, and it is read as "the beautiful one who closes", making it a description of the lotus shutting at dusk. The two readings imply different theologies and Egyptological reference works give both without settling between them.

What Would Settle It An early attestation where the name is written with a determinative or in a context that disambiguates tm as the divine name rather than the verb, or a demonstrably early orthography that rules one reading out.

Expertise Needed Egyptology, philology

Question posed in The Oxford Encyclopedia of Ancient Egypt, Donald B. Redford (ed.).

Open Chet, Avon and Pesha

Why It Is Open The three terms stand together in Leviticus 16 and Exodus 34 without any definition attached, and the graded reading is supplied by rabbinic literature centuries afterwards. Whether biblical Hebrew already distinguishes the three roots this way, or whether the distinction is a rabbinic construction laid over a rhetorical triplet, is a question of lexical semantics that this entry did not attempt to settle.

What Would Settle It A corpus study of every occurrence of the three roots in the Hebrew Bible, read alongside the Northwest Semitic epigraphic material, testing whether the intention grading holds independently of the rabbinic gloss.

Expertise Needed Biblical Hebrew lexicography; Northwest Semitic philology

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

Open Chen

Why It Is Open In the Classic inscriptions this month is written as a colour term joined to a second element read as sihoom. The colour term is secure. The second element is left untranslated, so the literal sense of the month name cannot be recovered from the inscriptions, and the storm gloss that circulates for it comes from the post-conquest Yucatec name instead.

What Would Settle It A collation of every spelling of the sign group across the Classic corpus, with its substitution sets and phonetic complements, set against the Colonial-period Yucatec and Cholan dictionaries, to test whether sihoom has a surviving lexical match.

Expertise Needed Maya epigraphy, with Mayan historical linguistics.

Question posed in The Maya (9th edition), Michael D. Coe and Stephen Houston.

Open Yax

Why It Is Open In the Classic inscriptions this month is written as a colour term joined to a second element read as sihoom. The colour term is secure. The second element is left untranslated, so the literal sense of the month name cannot be recovered from the inscriptions, and the storm gloss that circulates for it comes from the post-conquest Yucatec name instead.

What Would Settle It A collation of every spelling of the sign group across the Classic corpus, with its substitution sets and phonetic complements, set against the Colonial-period Yucatec and Cholan dictionaries, to test whether sihoom has a surviving lexical match.

Expertise Needed Maya epigraphy, with Mayan historical linguistics.

Question posed in The Maya (9th edition), Michael D. Coe and Stephen Houston.

Open Sak

Why It Is Open In the Classic inscriptions this month is written as a colour term joined to a second element read as sihoom. The colour term is secure. The second element is left untranslated, so the literal sense of the month name cannot be recovered from the inscriptions, and the storm gloss that circulates for it comes from the post-conquest Yucatec name instead.

What Would Settle It A collation of every spelling of the sign group across the Classic corpus, with its substitution sets and phonetic complements, set against the Colonial-period Yucatec and Cholan dictionaries, to test whether sihoom has a surviving lexical match.

Expertise Needed Maya epigraphy, with Mayan historical linguistics.

Question posed in The Maya (9th edition), Michael D. Coe and Stephen Houston.

Open Keh

Why It Is Open In the Classic inscriptions this month is written as a colour term joined to a second element read as sihoom. The colour term is secure. The second element is left untranslated, so the literal sense of the month name cannot be recovered from the inscriptions, and the storm gloss that circulates for it comes from the post-conquest Yucatec name instead.

What Would Settle It A collation of every spelling of the sign group across the Classic corpus, with its substitution sets and phonetic complements, set against the Colonial-period Yucatec and Cholan dictionaries, to test whether sihoom has a surviving lexical match.

Expertise Needed Maya epigraphy, with Mayan historical linguistics.

Question posed in The Maya (9th edition), Michael D. Coe and Stephen Houston.

Open Tibetan Na Ro ◌ོ

Why It Is Open Three of the four Tibetan vowel signs carry names that the grammatical tradition glosses transparently: gi gu, zhabs kyu and greng bu can all be read against ordinary words. Na ro is the exception. Readings are offered in the grammars and they do not agree, and this pass found no basis on which to prefer one, so the atlas states the sign and declines to gloss the name.

What Would Settle It A study tracing the term through the earliest Tibetan grammatical treatises and their commentaries, establishing when it first appears and whether an early commentator glosses it, rather than a further proposal built on the modern form of the words.

Expertise Needed Tibetan philology and the history of the indigenous grammatical tradition

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

Open Sarajevo Haggadah

Why It Is Open The manuscript's marginal notes place it in Italy by the sixteenth century, and it was purchased by the National Museum of Bosnia and Herzegovina in Sarajevo in 1894, but no source consulted names an owner, a sale or a route connecting the two. Three centuries of the manuscript's history are undocumented.

What Would Settle It An archival record, an auction or sale document, an ownership mark, or a scholarly study of the manuscript's codicology that names an intervening owner or location between its sixteenth century appearance in Italy and its 1894 purchase in Sarajevo.

Expertise Needed Manuscript provenance research, Sephardic Jewish history

Question posed in National Museum of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Sarajevo Haggadah Catalogue Record, National Museum of Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Open Imperial Regalia of Japan

Why It Is Open Shinto religious practice keeps all three objects permanently unshown. Atsuta Shrine, Ise Grand Shrine and the Imperial Household Agency have never permitted an outside examination, so nobody outside the shrines and the Agency has verified the objects present or their condition in the modern era.

What Would Settle It A supervised non-invasive examination, such as imaging conducted by the custodial shrines or the Imperial Household Agency themselves, since no outside access has ever been permitted.

Expertise Needed Shinto studies, archaeometry

Question posed in The Imperial Regalia: Japan's Three Sacred Treasures (Nippon.com), Nippon.com.

Open The Great Magical Papyrus of Paris

Why It Is Open The Theban Magical Library is a modern name for a group of papyri that share a period, a range of contents and a supplier. No excavation record exists for any of them. The attribution to Thebes and the assumption that they formed one collection both rest on the accounts of the dealer who sold them, and no scholar has been able either to confirm or to refute this from documentary evidence. It is an unresolved gap rather than a dispute between rival positions.

What Would Settle It A systematic reading of Anastasy's surviving correspondence and sale records against the acquisition registers and accession dates of the Bibliotheque nationale, the Rijksmuseum van Oudheden in Leiden, the British Museum and the Berlin collections. These archives have never been examined together for this question. Failing that, a securely excavated magical papyrus from a recorded Theban context would give the attribution an independent anchor.

Expertise Needed Papyrology, and the archival history of nineteenth century antiquities collecting

Question posed in Magic, Witchcraft, and Ghosts in the Greek and Roman Worlds: A Sourcebook, Daniel Ogden.

Open Aleppo Codex

Why It Is Open The codex was in the Great Synagogue of Aleppo when it burned in the riot of December 1947 and reached Israel in 1958 with about two fifths of its leaves gone. The leaves were never observed to burn, and the surviving pages show no fire damage consistent with the loss. Two leaves have since surfaced from private hands, in 1982 and in 2007, which shows that at least some left Aleppo intact. Beyond that there is no established account. Competing suspicions have been aired, about the community in Aleppo, about those who carried the codex out, and about the institution that received it, and none has been tested to a finding. This is an absence rather than a scholarly dispute: no one holds a position that can be read and argued with.

What Would Settle It Provenance research in the archives of the parties who handled the codex between 1947 and 1958, including the Ben-Zvi Institute's own acquisition file and the Israeli state inquiry papers; and forensic examination of any further leaf that surfaces, since the two recovered so far were identified by matching parchment and hand.

Expertise Needed Manuscript studies and archival provenance research; Hebrew and Arabic; the modern history of the Syrian Jewish communities.

Question posed in The Aleppo Codex: A True Story of Obsession, Faith, and the Pursuit of an Ancient Bible, Matti Friedman.

Open Mar Saba Letter

Why It Is Open The leaves were removed from their printed volume at the library of the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate in Jerusalem after the examination of 1983 and have not been publicly produced since. Nobody has stated where they are. Every argument about the document, on both sides of a fifty-year dispute, therefore rests on two sets of photographs, one black and white from 1958 and one colour from 1983. No ink analysis, no paper analysis and no examination of the writing under magnification by a document examiner with the original in front of them has ever been carried out. This is not a case of scholars disagreeing about evidence; it is a case of the evidence being unavailable.

What Would Settle It Locating the leaves within the Patriarchate library and permitting a standard document examination: ink composition, comparison of the ink against other eighteenth-century writing in the same collection, paper and pen analysis, and assessment of the hand by a forensic document examiner. Any of those would bear directly on whether the writing is of the eighteenth century or the twentieth, which is the question the whole dispute turns on.

Expertise Needed Manuscript studies and Greek palaeography; forensic document examination and ink chemistry; and the cooperation of the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate of Jerusalem.

Question posed in Mark's Other Gospel: Rethinking Morton Smith's Controversial Discovery, Scott G. Brown.

Open Ark of the Covenant

Why It Is Open The Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church restricts access to a single guardian monk and has never permitted independent examination of the chapel contents, so the claim rests on church tradition alone.

What Would Settle It An examination conducted by the church itself, or release of any documentary or photographic record it holds, since outside access is not permitted.

Expertise Needed Biblical archaeology, Ethiopian studies

Question posed in Church of Our Lady Mary of Zion, Aksum (Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church).

Open Johannes Angelus

Why It Is Open The degree images printed under the name of Johannes Angelus in 1488 are generally traced to earlier material circulating in manuscript and associated with the name of Pietro d'Abano, but the atlas has no citable study collating those manuscripts against the incunable. Without one, a statement that a particular degree image originates in this book cannot be checked, and the printed edition risks being treated as a source when it may only be a witness.

What Would Settle It A collation of the surviving manuscript witnesses of the degree image material against the 1488 Augsburg printing, establishing the recension the editor worked from and the extent of editorial change.

Expertise Needed History of astrology; incunable and manuscript studies; textual criticism

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

Open Aurum Solis

Why It Is Open The 1897 founding and both founders' names rest on the order's own account and on nothing else that has been produced. No lodge record, no correspondence and no third party notice of either name from the period has come to light, and no scholar has argued the point either way, so this is an absence rather than a disagreement.

What Would Settle It An archival search for the two names in English civil registration, probate and census returns for the period, together with a search of the surviving papers and membership rolls of the English occult lodges of the 1890s, and, if the order will open them, its own pre-1971 papers. Any one of the three would move the question.

Expertise Needed Archival history; history of Western esotericism

Question posed in Encyclopedia of American Religions, J. Gordon Melton.

Open Theban

Why It Is Open The whole case for a medieval Theban script is one sentence in the Polygraphia, and that sentence has been tested. The passage Trithemius cites is not in the works of Pietro d'Abano, and the one manuscript of the Sworn Book of Honorius that carries the alphabet says it took the characters from Agrippa, who was Trithemius's own pupil, so the script travels outward from 1518 rather than into it. What that leaves is an absence: nobody has named who cut the letters, and nobody argues for a rival origin, so this is a gap in the record rather than a dispute between camps. It is one question about one script, which is why it is asked here once rather than twenty six times over the letters.

What Would Settle It A witness to the letterforms from before 1518, in the Solomonic, ars notoria or alchemical manuscript traditions, or a systematic survey of those traditions returning nothing, which would be a real answer and not a failure. Failing either, work on Trithemius's own papers establishing whether he devised the script himself.

Expertise Needed History of Renaissance occultism; codicology of late medieval Latin magical manuscripts; history of cryptography

Question posed in The Sworn Book of Honorius (Liber Iuratus Honorii), Joseph H. Peterson's edition, Honorius of Thebes; Joseph H. Peterson (ed. and trans.).