Open Questions

Open Salomone Rossi

Why It Is Open Rossi is last documented in Mantuan court records around 1628. No source names a date or cause of death; he disappears from the record along with his sister Europa during the 1630 Austrian sack of Mantua and the plague that followed it, either of which could plausibly have killed him, and neither of which is confirmed to have.

What Would Settle It A burial record, a parish or ghetto register entry, a will, or a documented later sighting of Rossi in Venice, where some Mantuan Jewish refugees are known to have fled, any of which would fix either a date and place of death or evidence that he survived the sack.

Expertise Needed Archival research, Italian Jewish history of the War of the Mantuan Succession

Question posed in Wikipedia, "Salamone Rossi", Wikipedia contributors.

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 Nanak Shah Fakir (2015)

Why It Is Open In April 2018 the Akal Takht declared the film banned and excommunicated producer Harinder Singh Sikka for proceeding with its re-release regardless. Every source consulted for this entry stops there: none records whether the ban or the excommunication were later upheld, formally lifted, or quietly left unaddressed by Sikh religious authority.

What Would Settle It A later Akal Takht or SGPC statement, resolution or press record addressing either the ban or Sikka's excommunication after April 2018, or a current interview or public record confirming Sikka's present standing within the Sikh religious community.

Expertise Needed Contemporary Sikh institutional history, South Asian religion journalism

Question posed in SBS Punjabi, "Controversial Movie 'Nanak Shah Fakir' to Be Released Despite Protests," 2018, Paramjit Singh Sona.

Open Assembly of the Taoist Deities (Yongle Palace)

Why It Is Open The mural's own inscription and every modern source consulted credit Ma Junxiang and his son Ma Qi as its painters "and others," but none names those others, states how many additional painters worked on it, or describes how a mural of roughly four hundred square meters completed within a single year was divided among a workshop team.

What Would Settle It A closer reading of the mural's own inscription text, temple donor or workshop records from the period, or a stylistic analysis distinguishing individual painting hands across different sections of the mural, any of which could identify the additional painters or at least establish how many there were.

Expertise Needed Chinese art history, Yuan dynasty epigraphy, workshop and guild studies

Question posed in Wikipedia, "Yongle Gong", Wikipedia contributors.

Open Calligraphic Roundels of the Sultan Ahmed Mosque (Blue Mosque)

Why It Is Open Published encyclopedia and visitor-education accounts describe the roundels only in prose, as massive circular panels hung from the four dome piers, without giving a measured diameter or any other numeric dimension, and no published architectural survey of the mosque's interior fittings could be found.

What Would Settle It A published architectural survey or conservation report of the Sultan Ahmed Mosque's interior fittings giving the roundels' measured diameter, or a direct measurement taken and published by a future visitor or researcher with access to the mosque's own restoration records.

Expertise Needed Ottoman architectural history, historic building conservation

Question posed in The Divine Script: Decoding the Calligraphy of the Blue Mosque (bluemosque.tr).

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 Great Buddha of Kamakura

Why It Is Open No inscription, temple record or contemporary chronicle names the sculptor, workshop or foundry responsible for casting the 1252 bronze, unlike a number of later Japanese Buddhist bronzes whose makers are documented.

What Would Settle It A surviving Kamakura-period temple record, a foundry mark recovered from inside the hollow bronze during conservation work, or a documentary source not yet examined naming the casting workshop.

Expertise Needed Japanese art history, Kamakura-period documentary history

Question posed in Great Buddha of Kamakura (Wikipedia), Wikipedia contributors.

Open Wilton Diptych

Why It Is Open The panel carries no signature and no surviving documentary record names its painter; art historians disagree over whether the artist was English or French (or Franco-Flemish) trained, a debate more than a century old and still unresolved.

What Would Settle It A documentary record from Richard II's own household accounts naming a payment to a specific painter, or a technical or stylistic match confidently linking the panel to another securely attributed work from the same workshop.

Expertise Needed Medieval English and French art history

Question posed in Wilton Diptych (Wikipedia), Wikipedia contributors.

Open Ajanta Cave Paintings

Why It Is Open No inscription anywhere in the thirty caves names an individual painter or workshop; the paintings span roughly seven centuries and two distinct building phases, almost certainly the work of many different hands whose identities were never recorded or have not survived.

What Would Settle It A donor or workshop inscription not yet identified among the site's epigraphy, or a stylistic study confidently grouping specific caves to a named or datable workshop tradition documented elsewhere in the Vakataka or earlier period.

Expertise Needed South Asian art history, epigraphy

Question posed in Ajanta Caves, Paintings (Wikipedia), 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 Mata Khivi

Why It Is Open The Guru Granth Sahib, her strongest attestation, records no dates for her at all. The secondary Sikh reference literature that does venture birth and death years disagrees with itself, and no independent Mughal-era or Sikh documentary record has settled the question either way. The sixteenth-century placement usually given rests on her documented contemporaneity with Guru Angad's tenure as Guru from 1539 to 1552, not on a dated record of her own life.

What Would Settle It An independent contemporary or near-contemporary Sikh or Mughal-era record naming a specific year for her birth or her death would settle this. Absent that, a scholarly reconciliation of the secondary sources' disagreement, explaining which figures are more reliable and why, would at least narrow the range presently offered.

Expertise Needed Sikh history and textual studies

Question posed in The Sikh Religion: Its Gurus, Sacred Writings and Authors, vol. 1, Max Arthur Macauliffe.

Open Purvas

Why It Is Open The Purvas do not survive in any form. What is known of them comes entirely from later Jain canonical descriptions of their existence and content, not from the texts themselves, and no source outside the Jain tradition independently confirms either their content or that they trace to Mahavira's own teaching.

What Would Settle It The discovery of a surviving Purva manuscript, or an independent near-contemporary reference describing their actual content, would let the tradition's account of their origin be checked against something other than later restatement of the same tradition.

Expertise Needed Jain textual history and Indology

Question posed in The Jaina Path of Purification, Padmanabh S. Jaini.

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.).

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 Spurinna

Why It Is Open Suetonius and Cicero record Spurinna's warning to Caesar in detail down to the exact exchange on the Ides of March, but neither names his home city or region; "Etruscan-trained" is a profession and an ethnicity, not a place of origin, and nothing else of his life survives to supply one.

What Would Settle It An inscription, a further ancient text, or a modern prosopographical study of Etruscan haruspices that ties Spurinna to a specific Etruscan city, comparable to how other named haruspices of the period have been localized.

Expertise Needed Roman and Etruscan prosopography

Question posed in Suetonius, The Deified Julius (Divus Iulius), Gaius Suetonius Tranquillus.

Open Tutankhamun

Why It Is Open He is usually assumed to have been born at Akhetaten (Amarna), his father's court city, but this follows from an inference about his contested parentage rather than from a direct record; no inscription or administrative document names his birthplace.

What Would Settle It Resolution of his parentage (whether his father was Akhenaten or Smenkhkare) together with an inscription or administrative record placing his birth directly; neither currently exists.

Expertise Needed Egyptology; Amarna period studies; ancient DNA and mummy studies

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

Open Rylands Library Papyrus P52

Why It Is Open The fragment reached the John Rylands Library as part of a purchase of papyri from the Egyptian antiquities market in the early twentieth century, most likely acquired by the papyrologist Bernard Grenfell no later than 1920. No excavation record, findspot, or acquisition documentation naming the seller or the circumstances of discovery survives or was ever published, which is typical for papyri bought on the market rather than professionally excavated.

What Would Settle It Surviving acquisition correspondence or dealer records from the Rylands Library's early twentieth century papyrus purchases, if any exist and can be located, naming the seller and the material's reported findspot in Egypt.

Expertise Needed Papyrology, library archival history

Question posed in An Unpublished Fragment of the Fourth Gospel in the John Rylands Library, C. H. Roberts.

Open The Gospel of Jesus's Wife Fragment

Why It Is Open Karen King had custody of the fragment for study and testing between 2011 and roughly 2016. Ariel Sabar's reporting identified Walter Fritz as the owner and documented that the fragment was returned to him, but no institution or individual has publicly confirmed holding it since, and this atlas has found no subsequent public accounting of its physical location as of this entry.

What Would Settle It A public statement from Walter Fritz, Karen King, Harvard, or another named custodian confirming current possession, or the fragment surfacing again in scholarly, journalistic, or auction records.

Expertise Needed Investigative journalism, Coptic studies, manuscript provenance research

Question posed in Veritas: A Harvard Professor, a Con Man and the Gospel of Jesus's Wife, Ariel Sabar.

Open Halqa ࡀ

Why It Is Open Most Mandaic letters are named by their own sound with a preceding a (ab, ag, ad...), and their own descriptions state plainly this is a pronunciation label rather than an inherited word with a sense, unlike the Northwest Semitic nouns Hebrew and Syriac kept for the same slots. Six letters break that regular pattern by their own descriptions' own account (Its own text names the set: ushenna, aksa, dushenna, kad and it itself; In and Ash are separately marked as built on a different vowel or sound), and Dushenna and Kad, two of the six, already carry attested senses because they are documented ligatures of a real Aramaic word. The other four, plus Halqa, the very first letter and one of the script's three true vowel signs, whose name is equally outside the regular pattern, have no sense offered by any source consulted, and none of their descriptions states this as a settled absence either.

What Would Settle It A study of Mandaic's own manuscript and liturgical tradition for these specific six names, checked against Mandaic vocabulary and against the older Aramaic sequence's inherited nouns for the same six slots (Aleph, Waw, Heth, Yod, Ayin, Shin), beyond what the general reference literature already surveys.

Expertise Needed Mandaic studies; comparative Aramaic philology

Question posed in The Unicode Standard, The Unicode Consortium.

Open Djervi Ⰼ

Why It Is Open Djervi, the twelfth Glagolitic letter, sits well before the point in the alphabet recitation where letter names turn opaque or Greek-derived (that boundary falls at Tvrido, the twenty-first letter). Its own description states its sound, its regional history and its descendant the Serbian djerv, but gives no Slavonic word or sense behind the name itself, and no source consulted states whether this is a settled absence or simply unresearched.

What Would Settle It A study of the earliest Glagolitic abecedaria and of the South Slavic manuscript tradition that preserves djervi, checked against comparative Slavic dialect vocabulary for a word matching the form, beyond what the general reference literature already surveys.

Expertise Needed Slavic historical linguistics; Old Church Slavonic philology

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