Open Questions

Open Thulium

Why It Is Open Published crustal abundance estimates put both at roughly half a part per million, and the two sit within the uncertainty of each other. Sources disagree about which is lower, and several simply assert one without stating a figure.

What Would Settle It A modern determination of both abundances by the same method with stated uncertainties, so the comparison is like for like.

Expertise Needed Geochemistry, specifically crustal abundance measurement.

Question posed in Rare Earth Elements: Critical Resources for High Technology, Gordon B. Haxel, James B. Hedrick and Greta J. Orris, Pages 2 and 4.

Open Armenian Chant (Sharakan)

Why It Is Open Khaz signs were written above Armenian chant texts from about the ninth century and grew steadily more elaborate, but they did not fix pitch and appear to have cued gestures a singer already knew. When that oral knowledge lapsed the signs stopped being readable. Komitas Vardapet worked on the problem for years without reaching a reading, and Robert At'ayan's systematic study did not produce an agreed decipherment. There is no camp to argue against; the work simply stopped.

What Would Settle It A manuscript pairing khaz with a notation whose values are known, or a securely dated source setting Armenian signs beside Byzantine ones for the same melody, would give the system the external check it has never had. Comparative work on the earliest strata, before the signs multiplied, may also be able to fix a small core of them.

Expertise Needed Musicology and Armenian palaeography

Question posed in The Armenian Neume System of Notation, Robert At'ayan.

Open Georgian Chant

Why It Is Open Georgian hymn books of the tenth century carry chant signs, but nobody can say what they instruct. Comparison against Byzantine notation has not produced a reading and the Georgian signs do not map onto it cleanly. The consequence is severe for the tradition: no medieval Georgian melody can be recovered, and everything sung today descends from transcriptions made from living singers nine hundred years later. Nobody holds a rival decipherment; the question has simply been left where it was.

What Would Settle It A Georgian manuscript giving the same chant in both neumes and a notation of known values, or a bilingual source setting Georgian signs beside Byzantine ones, would supply the external control the system lacks. Systematic comparison of the neume repertory across the surviving tenth century books may also isolate a small core of signs whose behaviour is regular enough to test.

Expertise Needed Musicology and Georgian palaeography

Question posed in The Transcription and Transmission of Georgian Liturgical Chant, John A. Graham.

Open Sefer ha-Bahir (The Book of Illumination)

Why It Is Open Kabbalah has historically limited study of foundational texts such as the Bahir to students judged ready for it, and this widely published translation's own pages do not say whether that limitation reaches this edition or a citation drawn from it.

What Would Settle It Someone familiar with how this translation is actually used in practice today confirming whether it is treated as open study material or as a text still reserved for prepared students.

Question posed in Sefer ha-Bahir (The Book of Illumination), Anonymous.

Open The Secret of the Golden Flower: A Chinese Book of Life

Why It Is Open This is a Taoist text of internal alchemy with meditation instruction, and some lineages that teach material of this kind pass it only from a teacher to a prepared student; this edition's own pages do not say which applies here.

What Would Settle It Someone familiar with this translation and its source lineage confirming whether the meditation instruction it contains is still treated as limited to guided students or is offered here as published material.

Question posed in The Secret of the Golden Flower: A Chinese Book of Life, Trans. Richard Wilhelm; commentary by Carl Jung; English trans. Cary F. Baynes.

Open The Great Year

Why It Is Open This pass seeded only the four tropical-sign ages with genuine independent literature discussing them individually (Taurus, Aries, Pisces and Aquarius), plus the Great Year concept row that frames the whole twelve-part cycle. Gemini, Cancer, Leo, Virgo, Libra, Scorpio, Sagittarius and Capricorn were left out rather than written thin from the same general astrological-history sources already cited for the other four.

What Would Settle It A literature review of each remaining sign's astrological-age material, checking whether it has been discussed with comparable depth and citable sourcing to Nicholas Campion's treatment of Taurus, Aries, Pisces and Aquarius in A History of Western Astrology, before writing per-age entries rather than a single thin placeholder for all eight.

Expertise Needed History of astrology / esoteric studies

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

Open Jaguar

Why It Is Open The were-jaguar infant is one of the most frequent and unmistakable figures in Olmec sculpture, appearing across major sites from San Lorenzo to La Venta. The Olmec left no deciphered textual record explaining their iconography, so nothing establishes whether the figure depicts a mythic birth, a were-jaguar transformation, a ruler's supernatural parentage or something else. Proposed readings are informed guesses drawn from later Mesoamerican parallels rather than conclusions drawn from Olmec sources themselves.

What Would Settle It Decipherment of a securely dated Olmec or Epi-Olmec inscription that names or glosses the figure, or a controlled excavation context, an offering, a burial or a workshop, that ties a were-jaguar sculpture to an identifiable ritual practice.

Expertise Needed Mesoamerican archaeology, epigraphy

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

Open Raphael

Why It Is Open Until 2026-07-30 the site tagged Raphael as an Islamic archangel on the strength of a shared name alone, not through evidence. That tag was not carried across when religion membership for archangels was later reviewed: the Islamic identification runs through Israfil, and the atlas holds nothing establishing that the two figures are one and the same. Raphael's own name-origin properties tie him to the Book of Tobit and note his absence from the Hebrew Bible. Recording the identification would have been a guess, so it was left out and the question written down instead.

What Would Settle It A survey of classical Islamic angelology, hadith collections and tafsir establishing whether Israfil is identified with Raphael inside the tradition itself rather than only in later comparative writing, together with the earliest datable text that makes the equation. A positive finding is one recorded link between Raphael and Islam, with that source attached. A negative finding closes this question as withdrawn.

Expertise Needed Islamic studies, comparative angelology, history of religions

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

Open Americas

Why It Is Open Ptolemy's four quarters divide only the oikoumene, the inhabited world known in the second century, and the western hemisphere lies wholly outside it. No quarter, triplicity or planetary co-ruler was ever assigned to the Americas by the tradition that built the scheme, and nothing proposed since has acquired comparable standing. This is not a lost passage or a disputed reading; it is an absence created by the geographic horizon of the source.

What Would Settle It A survey of the mundane astrological literature from the sixteenth century onward, when the Americas entered European awareness, establishing whether any author extended the chorography to the new hemisphere, on what reasoning, and whether the extension was taken up by anyone else. A negative result would settle the entry as firmly as a positive one, and either way the entry ceases to be an open absence.

Expertise Needed History of astrology; early modern intellectual history; history of geographic knowledge

Question posed in A History of Western Astrology, Nicholas Campion.

Open The Fourth Buddhist Council in Kashmir

Why It Is Open The accounts that name a place do not name the same one, they are all late, northern and secondary, and no site has ever been identified on the ground. Nobody defends a location, so this is a gap in the record rather than an argument between camps.

What Would Settle It An inscription naming the assembly, or the excavation of a monastic complex in Kashmir or the north-west of the subcontinent large enough to house it and carrying Sarvastivada Abhidharma material of the right date.

Expertise Needed South Asian archaeology and epigraphy, working with Buddhist studies

Question posed in History of Indian Buddhism: From the Origins to the Saka Era, Etienne Lamotte, translated by Sara Webb-Boin.

Open Chachapoya

Why It Is Open The Chachapoya left no deciphered writing system, and Spanish chroniclers who might have recorded their beliefs encountered them only after Inca conquest had already reshaped their political and religious institutions in the late fifteenth century. Their monumental architecture, sarcophagi and mummy bundles are extensively documented archaeologically, but the specific deities, cosmology and ritual meaning behind that material record are not confidently known from any surviving account.

What Would Settle It Further bioarchaeological and iconographic study of undisturbed Chachapoya funerary sites, such as the Laguna de los Condores mausoleums, that could recover painted or carved religious imagery predating Inca influence, together with any Chachapoya-specific vocabulary that might survive embedded in later colonial-era Quechua or Spanish records of the region.

Expertise Needed Andean archaeology and bioarchaeology

Question posed in Chachapoyas: Cultural Development at an Andean Cloud Forest Crossroads (Church and von Hagen), Warren B. Church and Adriana von Hagen.

Open Nazca

Why It Is Open The Nazca (about 100 BCE to 800 CE) left no writing system, so no text records their own speech. The Quechua and Aymara families dominant on the Peruvian south coast today arrived through Inca imperial expansion in the fifteenth century and Spanish colonial administration afterward, six hundred years or more after Nazca civilization had already ended, so their modern presence cannot be read backward onto the Nazca population. Scholarship on Andean historical linguistics treats a Quechuan or Aymaran tie for the pre-Inca south coast cultures as speculative, resting on colonial-era impressions of multilingualism that may equally reflect internal variation within those two families elsewhere in the Andes.

What Would Settle It A securely dated Nazca-period inscription would settle it outright, but none has been found and the culture is understood to have had no writing system at all. Short of that, a documented layer of loanwords or toponyms in a later, attested language that can be traced specifically and exclusively to the pre-Inca Rio Grande de Nasca drainage, rather than to the wider post-Inca Quechua-speaking Andes, would be evidence a historical linguist could evaluate.

Expertise Needed Historical linguistics, archaeology

Question posed in The Languages of the Andes, Willem F. H. Adelaar with Pieter C. Muysken.

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 Kislev

Why It Is Open Several Hebrew month names carry an accepted native gloss (Adar, mighty; Av, father; Elul, search or inquiry; Iyar, blossoming), already recorded on this atlas. Kislev, Shevat, Tevet and, separately, the deity name Tammuz do not: their Babylonian origin is well established but no settled etymology for the specific Hebrew forms is recorded in the sources consulted for this pass.

What Would Settle It An Assyriological or comparative Semitic source tracing each Babylonian calendar-month name to its own root meaning, matched against the accepted glosses already recorded for the other months in the same cycle.

Expertise Needed Assyriology and comparative Semitic philology

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

Open The Army, Line 5

Why It Is Open King Wen 7 lines 3 and 5 contain the same two character phrase in the received Chinese text, the one usually rendered as carrying corpses in the wagon. The atlas keeps the image at line 3, whose description reads that the army may carry corpses in its wagons, and drops it at line 5, whose description reads only that disorder follows even a just cause. One phrase is therefore represented twice in two incompatible registers, and nothing on either page tells a reader that the underlying text is the same. Whether this was a deliberate reading or an accident of two passes is not recorded.

What Would Settle It Checking the received text of King Wen 7 lines 3 and 5 against a critical edition, then deciding one way for both lines: either the concrete image is kept in both, or the reason for treating the two occurrences differently is stated on the page. Any correction touches a line description and is owner gated.

Expertise Needed Sinology, specifically the textual history of the Zhou Yi.

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

Open Lag BaOmer

Why It Is Open The rabbinic sources report the deaths of Akiva's students as a plague and do not connect them to the revolt. A reading that treats the plague as a veiled account of wartime losses is in circulation, and the counter-reading takes the sources at their word. This pass found no source it could verify on either side, so it wrote no relation between the holiday and the revolt.

What Would Settle It A study of the talmudic and geonic witnesses to the Akiva tradition set against the documentary and archaeological record of the revolt, establishing whether the connection is ancient or a later harmonisation.

Expertise Needed Rabbinic literature; Roman-period Jewish history

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

Open Reformed Egyptian

Why It Is Open Reformed Egyptian is described only inside the Book of Mormon's own text, attributed to Nephite scribes modifying Egyptian characters over centuries. No inscription, manuscript or artifact outside that text has been identified as an example of it, and mainstream Egyptology and historical linguistics have found no independent evidence such a script existed, so there is nothing external against which to locate an origin.

What Would Settle It An inscription or manuscript independently datable and decipherable, found outside the Book of Mormon tradition, that could be shown on linguistic or archaeological grounds to be the same writing system, would give scholars an actual artifact to locate and analyze.

Expertise Needed Egyptology and historical linguistics

Question posed in The Book of Mormon, Joseph Smith (translator, by his own account), Mormon 9:32-34.

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 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 Presentism

Why It Is Open Essentialism, Interactionism and Nominalism, the three sibling metaphysical positions filled in the same pass, each name one historical figure as principal proponent directly in their own text (Aristotle, Descartes, Ockham). Presentism's own text sets out the position and its objections in the same style but names nobody as having first defended or best defended it.

What Would Settle It A citable history-of-philosophy source identifying the position's clearest or earliest defender, whether an ancient or medieval figure arguing from ordinary intuition about the reality of the present, or a modern one such as the logicians who built formal tense logic specifically to defend it.

Expertise Needed History of philosophy

Question posed in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Edward N. Zalta and Uri Nodelman (eds.).