Open Questions

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 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 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 Æcerbot

Why It Is Open The word occurs once in the surviving Old English corpus. It is addressed, it is given the epithet mother of earth, and it stands where a name would stand. It has been read as a lost goddess name, as a title, as a loanword, as a corruption of another word, and as an exclamatory particle that is not a name at all. None of these has been accepted, and the reason is not that scholars are divided between defended positions but that a single occurrence gives nothing to test a proposal against. Work on it was begun and could not be concluded.

What Would Settle It A second attestation of the word in any Old English or related source: a charm, a gloss, a place name or a personal name element, showing it in a context that constrains its meaning. Old English glossaries and the English place-name survey have been searched, and re-running that search against material catalogued since, including manuscript fragments and minor place-name collections, is the practical task. A continental Germanic cognate in a comparable ritual context would serve equally well.

Expertise Needed Old English philology, Germanic comparative linguistics and English place-name study

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

Open The Recorded Corpus of Hoodoo Conjure

Why It Is Open Hyatt recorded thousands of interviews in the Jim Crow South as a white clergyman paying Black practitioners to describe a practice that had been criminalised and ridiculed. The transcripts record what was said. They cannot record what was not said, what was simplified for a paying outsider, or what was offered in place of something withheld. Every quantitative claim drawn from the collection, about regional distribution, about the frequency of a given practice, about what conjure was for, inherits this and it is rarely stated.

What Would Settle It Comparison of Hyatt's material against independently gathered testimony from the same communities and period, including Hurston's, the Federal Writers' Project narratives, and community-held family records, looking systematically for what appears in one and not the other. Oral history with descendants of identified informants, where the identification can be made, would test it directly. The question is answerable in principle and has not been pursued at scale.

Expertise Needed African American folklore studies, oral history and the historiography of ethnographic fieldwork

Question posed in Black Magic: Religion and the African American Conjuring Tradition, Yvonne P. Chireau.

Open The Braucherei Charm Tradition

Why It Is Open Braucherei was carried to Pennsylvania by German-speaking migrants and was then given a printed form by Hohman in 1820 and by the collections that followed. Practitioners distinguish sharply between a charm received from a person and one read in a book, but the two streams have been running alongside each other for two centuries and the printed texts drew on oral material to begin with. Which direction any particular charm travelled is not generally recoverable from what has been recorded.

What Would Settle It Systematic comparison of the Pennsylvania repertoire against continental German charm collections of the same and earlier periods, in particular the Palatine and Rhineland material from which the migration came, tracing individual charm types rather than the collections as wholes. Manuscript charm books held privately in Pennsylvania German families, where access can be negotiated on the families' terms, would be the decisive evidence.

Expertise Needed German folklore studies, Pennsylvania German studies and comparative charm scholarship

Question posed in Powwowing among the Pennsylvania Dutch: A Traditional Medical Practice in the Modern World, David W. Kriebel.

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 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.

Open The Words of Institution

Why It Is Open The received East Syriac text has no institution narrative, and the Holy See judged eucharists celebrated with it valid in 2001 on the ground that the words are present in the prayer in a dispersed form. Whether the narrative was omitted, was lost in transmission, or was never there is argued from the manuscript tradition and from the structure of the prayer, and this run could not establish which reading holds the field.

What Would Settle It A study of the earliest East Syriac manuscript witnesses and their variants, set against the structure of the related Syriac anaphoras, together with the responses published by liturgical scholars to the 2001 guidelines.

Expertise Needed Liturgical history; Syriac manuscript studies

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

Open Korban (The Israelite Offering)

Why It Is Open The Mishnah was redacted around 200 CE, more than a century after the Temple was destroyed, and it is the only detailed source for most of the procedure. Josephus, Philo and the Qumran texts corroborate the institutions but very little of the fine detail, and the two bodies of evidence were produced for different purposes.

What Would Settle It A systematic detail-by-detail comparison of Mishnaic procedure against the pre-70 evidence, distinguishing points corroborated by Josephus, Philo, Qumran and the surviving epigraphy from points attested only in the Mishnah, would show where the account is anchored and where it is not. Fresh documentary or epigraphic material from the Temple period would move individual points.

Expertise Needed Rabbinics, Second Temple history, epigraphy

Question posed in From the Maccabees to the Mishnah, Shaye J. D. Cohen.

Open Parah Adumah (The Red Heifer)

Why It Is Open Mishnah tractate Parah is the only source that supplies a count, and it records a dispute over the total rather than a settled figure. No independent documentary, epigraphic or archaeological attestation of any single performance has been identified, so there is nothing outside that one list against which the number can be checked. Nobody holds a defended position on the true count; the record is simply absent.

What Would Settle It An independent Second Temple period attestation would settle at least one performance: an ostracon, papyrus or inscription referring to the preparation of the ashes or to the water of lustration, or a securely dated installation on the Mount of Olives identifiable with the rite. Systematic re-reading of the Judaean desert documentary material for purity-water vocabulary is the cheapest place to look.

Expertise Needed Second Temple epigraphy and papyrology, archaeology of Roman Judaea

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

Open Extispicy and Haruspicy

Why It Is Open No book of the Etruscan discipline survives in any language. The Piacenza liver assigns divine names to regions of the organ and says nothing about method, and the Roman authors who describe haruspicy were writing from outside the tradition, often centuries later, and were not attempting to transmit a procedure. Nobody has proposed and defended a reconstruction of the method, so what is missing is evidence rather than agreement.

What Would Settle It An Etruscan haruspical text of any length would settle it, and a bilingual would settle it decisively. Failing that, a systematic comparison of the Piacenza liver against the far better documented Mesopotamian liver models and their accompanying omen compendia would at least establish whether the two systems share a method, which would constrain the possibilities.

Expertise Needed Etruscology, Etruscan epigraphy, Assyriology

Question posed in The Religion of the Etruscans, Nancy Thomson de Grummond and Erika Simon (eds.).

Open The Words of Institution

Why It Is Open A group of early witnesses gives a shorter text of Luke 22 that stops after the first mention of the cup, and the longer text, printed in most modern critical editions, gives the bread and a second cup. The two readings shape the passage differently and the argument has run for more than a century. This run recorded the dispute on this page but did not establish where the weight of current textual scholarship sits.

What Would Settle It A current survey of the manuscript evidence and of the argument over the Western non-interpolations, with the editorial reasoning of the major critical editions set side by side.

Expertise Needed New Testament textual criticism

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 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 Intinction

Why It Is Open Churches suspended the common cup during the influenza pandemic of 1918 and again in the epidemics of the following century, and intinction and individual glasses spread as a result. This run deliberately made no claim about transmission risk because it could not verify one, and the relationship between what has been measured and what churches actually decided is not established here.

What Would Settle It A review of the published microbiological and epidemiological studies of the shared chalice, paired with the actual decisions of church authorities, to establish whether the evidence drove the practice or followed it.

Expertise Needed Epidemiology; liturgical studies

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

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 Tamid (The Daily Offering)

Why It Is Open The tractate narrates the daily service circumstantially, from the priests rising to the completion of the offering, and that circumstantiality is exactly what makes its status hard to judge: a literary reconstruction written to be persuasive would look the same. It was redacted long after the last offering was made, and no pre-70 source describes the sequence in comparable detail.

What Would Settle It A point-by-point comparison of the tractate against Josephus, Philo, the Temple Scroll and the Qumran calendrical material, separating items with independent support from items attested only there, would show how much of the sequence is anchored. Priestly course inscriptions and any further Temple-period administrative material would add anchor points.

Expertise Needed Rabbinics, Second Temple history, Dead Sea Scrolls studies

Question posed in From the Maccabees to the Mishnah, Shaye J. D. Cohen.