Open Questions

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 1953 Lahore (Punjab) Anti-Ahmadi Riots

Why It Is Open The Punjab government's own Court of Inquiry documented roughly twenty three deaths from military and police action, a figure drawn from official operational reports rather than a citywide casualty survey. Later accounts of the riots commonly cite a far higher toll approaching two thousand, but no version of that figure traced here names the study, archive or method behind it, and no historian has reconciled the two.

What Would Settle It A systematic reconstruction working from Lahore and Punjab hospital, police and municipal burial records for February to May 1953, of the kind that would let a historian check the widely repeated higher estimate against a documented count rather than against the Court of Inquiry's own operational figures alone.

Expertise Needed Modern South Asian and Pakistani history; historical demography

Question posed in Politics of Desecularization: Law and the Minority Question in Pakistan, Sadia Saeed.

Open 1969 Ahmedabad Riots

Why It Is Open The Reddy Commission of Inquiry's own report acknowledges its recorded figure of more than six hundred and sixty dead as an undercount, since many bodies were never retrieved in a condition allowing identification and some deaths were never formally reported to police; historians' higher estimates of one to two thousand are themselves not built from a systematic recount but from unofficial contemporary reports.

What Would Settle It A systematic archival study working from Ahmedabad hospital, mortuary and municipal burial records alongside contemporary press and community accounts, on the model of later Indian communal-violence casualty reconstructions, to produce one reconciled toll for the September 1969 riots.

Expertise Needed Modern South Asian history; historical demography

Question posed in Communalism and Sexual Violence in India: The Politics of Gender, Ethnicity and Conflict, Megha Kumar.

Open Dungan Revolt (1862 to 1877)

Why It Is Open Population-history reconstructions for Shaanxi and Gansu document a catastrophic regional population collapse across 1862 to 1877, but no historian has separated deaths directly caused by combat and massacre from the era's simultaneous famine, disease and mass flight, and Chu's political and military study of the revolt's course does not attempt a casualty count at all.

What Would Settle It A demographic study working from surviving Qing provincial and local gazetteer population records across Shaanxi, Gansu and Ningxia, applying a consistent method capable of separating war and massacre deaths from the period's independently documented famine and plague mortality.

Expertise Needed Late Qing history; historical demography

Question posed in The Moslem Rebellion in Northwest China, 1862 to 1878: A Study of Government Minority Policy, Wen-djang Chu.

Open Irish Confederate Wars

Why It Is Open William Petty's 1650s Down Survey remains the era's only systematic contemporary count, and modern historians including Lenihan treat his method, extrapolating from incomplete surveys and combining combat, massacre, famine and plague deaths into one total, as unreliable for a precise war-specific figure without offering a reconciled alternative of their own.

What Would Settle It A modern demographic reconstruction applying consistent method to seventeenth century Irish parish, estate and muster records, capable of separating combat and massacre deaths from the era's simultaneous, and largely coincidental, famine and plague mortality.

Expertise Needed Early modern Irish history; historical demography

Question posed in Confederate Catholics at War, 1641 to 1649, Padraig Lenihan.

Open Basque Mythology

Why It Is Open Basque mythology survives only as legend recorded from rural informants after Christianization was already dominant, and Basque, a language isolate, offers no comparative linguistic route to an earlier stage the way related Indo-European mythologies do. Nothing currently ties the figure of Mari or the wider nature-spirit cast to any datable period before the ethnographic record itself.

What Would Settle It An inscription, cult site or artifact in the western Pyrenees securely tied to a named pre-Christian Basque deity or practice, or a linguistic reconstruction anchoring core mythological vocabulary to a datable stage of the Basque language, would give scholars an actual point to reason from instead of the modern record alone.

Expertise Needed archaeology and historical linguistics

Question posed in Selected Writings of Jose Miguel de Barandiaran: Basque Prehistory and Ethnography, Jose Miguel de Barandiaran, ed. Jesus Altuna, trans. Frederick H. Fornoff, Linda White and Carys Evans-Corrales.

Open Ladin Mythology

Why It Is Open The Ladin legend cycle of the Dolomite valleys was gathered into literary form only in the early twentieth century, and no formal pantheon, priesthood or earlier textual trace survives to say how old the material already was when it was collected.

What Would Settle It An earlier manuscript, inscription or outside traveler's account referencing specific Ladin mountain-spirit legends before their twentieth century literary collection would establish a real floor for the material's age.

Expertise Needed folklore studies and historical linguistics

Question posed in Dolomitensagen (Wolff), Karl Felix Wolff.

Open Sardinian Folk Tradition

Why It Is Open Sardinian folk belief is described as layered over the island's prehistoric Nuragic civilization and Ozieri culture tombs, but the folklore itself was recorded only from the nineteenth century onward, and nothing currently establishes a documented line of transmission between the prehistoric archaeological culture and the modern oral material.

What Would Settle It Archaeological or textual evidence linking specific Nuragic-era ritual practice to a named figure or custom still recorded in nineteenth or twentieth century Sardinian folklore would establish an actual continuity, rather than a merely geographic layering.

Expertise Needed archaeology and folklore studies

Question posed in Leggende e Racconti Popolari della Sardegna (Turchi), Dolores Turchi.

Open Sicilian Folk Religion

Why It Is Open Everything known about the donne di fuori comes from sixteenth and seventeenth century Inquisition trial transcripts, an adversarial record built from interrogation rather than celebration, and no source independent of that prosecution says how established the belief already was when the trials began.

What Would Settle It A Sicilian civil, notarial or ecclesiastical record predating the sixteenth century that references night-gathering spirit-women under any name would show the belief already existed before the surviving trial record begins.

Expertise Needed history and folklore studies

Question posed in The Ladies from Outside (Henningsen), Gustav Henningsen, in Bengt Ankarloo and Gustav Henningsen (eds.).

Open Tengrism

Why It Is Open Test why open, twenty plus characters here easily.

What Would Settle It Test what would resolve, twenty plus characters here easily.

Expertise Needed Sociology of religion

Question posed in Tengrism (Wikipedia).

Open The Neronian Persecution of Christians (64 CE)

Why It Is Open Tacitus, writing roughly fifty years after the event and the near-sole near-contemporary source, describes an "immense multitude" convicted without giving any number, and no other source from within a century of the fire supplies one; the 979 figure sometimes quoted traces to Jerome's chronicle of the 390s CE, over three centuries later.

What Would Settle It No further ancient source is likely to surface at this distance; a systematic review of the archaeological and epigraphic record for first century Roman burial or execution sites tied to this specific episode could at best establish a documented floor rather than a true total.

Expertise Needed Roman imperial history; early Christian source criticism

Question posed in Tacitus, Annals, Book XV, Publius Cornelius Tacitus.

Open The Decian Persecution of Christians (250 to 251 CE)

Why It Is Open The surviving libelli document compliance, not casualties, and no ancient Christian writer or modern historian has reconstructed an aggregate death total for the roughly eighteen months of enforcement; only named individual executions are on record.

What Would Settle It A systematic collation of the named martyrologies and surviving correspondence across the persecution's eighteen months, of the kind that could establish a documented floor even without a claim to completeness.

Expertise Needed Roman imperial history; early Christian source criticism

Question posed in Persecution of Christians in the Roman Empire (Wikipedia).

Open The Persecution of Beta Israel Under Ethiopia's Solomonic Emperors

Why It Is Open The surviving Ethiopian chronicle record names individual episodes across two centuries of intermittent campaigns, the execution of the rebel leader Goshen and reports of mass suicide rather than conversion, but no ancient or modern historian consulted has attempted a running total across the whole span from Yeshaq to Susenyos.

What Would Settle It A systematic collation of the surviving Ethiopian royal chronicles across each named campaign, of the kind that could establish a documented floor for at least the better-recorded episodes even without a claim to completeness for the whole two centuries.

Expertise Needed Ethiopian history; Ethiopian royal chronicle studies

Question posed in History of the Jews in Ethiopia (Wikipedia).

Open The Valerian Persecution of Christians (257 to 260 CE)

Why It Is Open The surviving record names individual clergy executions in detail, including Sixtus II, Lawrence and Cyprian, but the 258 edict's own rank-based penalty structure for laity, degradation and confiscation short of death for many, means no ancient or modern historian consulted has reconstructed an aggregate death total across the whole three years of enforcement.

What Would Settle It A systematic collation of the named martyrologies and surviving contemporary correspondence, including Cyprian's own letters, across the persecution's three years, of the kind that could establish a documented floor even without a claim to completeness for the wider laity the second edict also targeted.

Expertise Needed Roman imperial history; early Christian source criticism

Question posed in Persecution of Christians in the Roman Empire (Wikipedia).

Open Alevism

Why It Is Open No government census in Turkey records sect within Islam, so every published Alevi population figure is a scholarly or advocacy estimate; the widely repeated ten to twenty million range is quoted across sources without a shared reference year.

What Would Settle It A dedicated demographic survey fielded in Turkey that asked about Alevi identity specifically, dated and methodologically documented, would let a real time-stamped estimate replace the undated range in circulation today.

Question posed in The Alevis in Turkey: The Emergence of a Secular Islamic Tradition, David Shankland.

Open BAPS Swaminarayan Sanstha

Why It Is Open BAPS separated from the Vadtal diocese of the Swaminarayan Sampradaya in 1905 to 1907, a parent body distinct from BAPS itself, but no entity for that diocese or for the wider Swaminarayan Sampradaya as a parent organization currently exists in the atlas, so BAPS's branch-of relation has no live target to point at.

What Would Settle It Minting a denomination entity for the Swaminarayan Sampradaya, or specifically its Vadtal diocese, with its own sourced facts, would let BAPS's branch-of relation and any other Swaminarayan-descended body's equivalent be written honestly.

Question posed in History and Milestones (BAPS Swaminarayan Sanstha, baps.org), BAPS Swaminarayan Sanstha.