Open Questions

Open Nehunya ben HaKanah

Why It Is Open The Mishnah preserves only two prayers and a maxim in his name, enough to place him among the tannaim of the generation around 70 CE but not enough to fix an actual birth year, and almost nothing else about his life survives.

What Would Settle It An external documentary or epigraphic record naming a birth year, independent of the brief mishnaic attributions and of the later medieval kabbalistic ascriptions made in his name.

Expertise Needed Rabbinics, history of the Second Temple and Mishnaic period

Question posed in Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, Gershom Scholem.

Open Thonmi Sambhota

Why It Is Open The earliest accounts of Thonmi Sambhota's life were written some four centuries after the events they describe, and even his traditional mission date of 632 is not agreed among them; no source, early or late, gives a birth year, and some scholars question whether a single historical minister stands behind the tradition at all.

What Would Settle It A source contemporary with Songtsen Gampo's seventh century reign naming Thonmi Sambhota and a birth year, which no presently known Tibetan or external record supplies.

Expertise Needed Tibetan history, history of the Tibetan script

Question posed in Tibet: A History, Sam van Schaik.

Open Kartir

Why It Is Open Kartir's own inscriptions and the Paikuli inscription of Narseh together document his public career into 293 CE, but no source records what became of him after that year or gives an actual death date.

What Would Settle It A dated Sasanian inscription, seal or administrative record naming Kartir after 293 CE, or an external source recording his death.

Expertise Needed Sasanian history, Zoroastrian studies, Iranian epigraphy

Question posed in Sasanian Persia: The Rise and Fall of an Empire, Touraj Daryaee.

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 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 The First Jewish-Roman War (66 to 73 CE)

Why It Is Open Josephus's own account gives a total near 1.1 million dead in the siege of Jerusalem alone, a figure the Roman historian Tacitus's separate report of 600,000 under siege does not resolve, and modern historians agree first century Judea's population could not have sustained losses on either scale, without offering a reconciled replacement figure of their own.

What Would Settle It A demographic and archaeological reconstruction of first century Judea's total population and its capacity, of the kind that would let historians test Josephus's and Tacitus's figures against an independent ceiling rather than against each other.

Expertise Needed Roman-era historical demography; classical archaeology

Question posed in The Jewish War, Flavius Josephus.

Open Chernobog

Why It Is Open Chernobog is attested exactly once, by the twelfth-century German cleric Helmold of Bosau, who names the Black God only to say that Baltic Slavic tribes cursed him at their feasts for bringing misfortune. Helmold describes no idol, image, temple or cult object, and no earlier or independent later source, inscription or archaeological find corroborates or adds to his brief mention.

What Would Settle It An independent contemporary or near-contemporary textual witness describing a Chernobog cult image, or an archaeological find, such as the kind of carved Slavic cult idol recovered elsewhere on the Baltic coast, that can be identified with this god specifically rather than with the pantheon in general.

Expertise Needed Slavic archaeology, medieval Baltic and Wendish history, history of religion

Question posed in The Slavs (Gimbutas), Marija Gimbutas.

Open The Nizari-Seljuk Conflicts (1090 to 1194)

Why It Is Open The surviving chronicles, compiled generations after the events by dynasties hostile to the Nizaris, report figures for distinct episodes (assassinated officials, massacred communities, one city's casualties) rather than a single reconciled total, and modern historians including Lewis and Daftary have not synthesized them into an agreed toll for the century-long conflict.

What Would Settle It A systematic cross-check of the Persian chronicle tradition against surviving documentary and archaeological evidence from the Nizari strongholds and the Seljuk provinces, of the kind that could distinguish which reported episodes are independently corroborated from which are hostile chronicle embellishment.

Expertise Needed Medieval Islamic history; Persian and Arabic chronicle source criticism

Question posed in The Assassin Legends: Myths of the Ismailis, Farhad Daftary.

Open The Donatist-Catholic Conflict and Circumcellion Violence (312 to 411 CE)

Why It Is Open Augustine's letters and sermons, the fullest surviving contemporary source, name individual incidents of circumcellion violence and its Catholic reprisals but never attempt a running total across the century of intermittent conflict, and no other ancient writer or modern historian has reconstructed one from the surviving legal and ecclesiastical record.

What Would Settle It A systematic collation of every named incident across Augustine's correspondence, sermons and the acts of North African church councils, of the kind that could at least establish a documented floor even without a claim to completeness.

Expertise Needed Late antique church history; patristic source criticism

Question posed in Sacred Violence: African Christians and Sectarian Hatred in the Age of Augustine, Brent D. Shaw.

Open The Kitos War (115 to 117 CE)

Why It Is Open The only surviving casualty figures come from Cassius Dio, writing roughly a century after the events, and modern scholarship treats his numbers as rhetorical inflation rather than a demographic count; no archaeological or documentary reconstruction has produced an independent total for the revolt across its several fronts.

What Would Settle It Archaeological and papyrological evidence of settlement destruction and population loss in Cyrenaica, Egypt and Cyprus specifically datable to 115 to 117 CE, of the kind that could ground an independent estimate against Cassius Dio's figures.

Expertise Needed Roman imperial history; classical archaeology of Cyrenaica and Cyprus

Question posed in Jewish War under Trajan and Hadrian, William Horbury.

Open The Kharijite Rebellions (685 to 699 CE)

Why It Is Open The surviving Arabic chronicle tradition records the rebellions as a sequence of individual battles and sieges across Iraq, Persia and Arabia rather than one accounted campaign, and no modern historian has combined the separate engagements into a war-wide casualty total.

What Would Settle It A systematic tally of the individual battle and siege accounts already preserved in the early Arabic chronicle tradition, cross-checked against what independent evidence of the period's population and military scale can bear, of the kind no historian of the rebellions has yet undertaken.

Expertise Needed Early Islamic history; Arabic chronicle source criticism

Question posed in The Prophet and the Age of the Caliphates: The Islamic Near East from the Sixth to the Eleventh Century, Hugh Kennedy.

Open The Macina Jihad and the Diina of Maasina (1818 to 1862)

Why It Is Open Surviving sources describe troop strengths for individual engagements such as the Battle of Noukouma rather than casualties, and Sanankoua's specialist study drawing on family papers and regional archives does not attempt a running total across the jihad's founding, the Diina's four decades as a state, or its 1862 fall.

What Would Settle It A systematic reconstruction from Arabic-language chronicles, oral tradition and colonial-era administrative records of the Inner Niger Delta region, of the kind that could establish at least a documented floor for the jihad's opening campaigns and the Diina's 1862 fall.

Expertise Needed West African history; Arabic and oral-tradition source criticism

Question posed in Un Empire peul au XIXe siecle: la Diina du Maasina, Bintou Sanankoua.

Open Ghmerti

Why It Is Open Ghmerti is the old Kartvelian word for the divine and remains the modern Georgian word for the Christian God, and the medieval chronicles that describe the pre-Christian Kartlian pantheon survive only in Christian-era compilation, written by authors already using the same word for the god of the new religion. Nothing in that filtered record describes an image, statue or symbol for a distinct pre-Christian figure under this name, and no archaeological find has been identified as one either.

What Would Settle It An archaeological find, a carved or cast object identifiable as a pre-Christian Kartlian sky or divinity figure, or a surviving pre-Christian textual witness independent of the later Christian chroniclers, either of which would show whether the word ever named a figure with a pictorial or sculptural tradition of its own.

Expertise Needed Kartvelian studies, Caucasian archaeology

Question posed in The Georgians (Lang), David Marshall Lang.

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.