Question Backlog
Overflow from the wave-2 harvest of domain-note open questions (2026-06-11, fixing BiasAudit-2026-06-11 critical #4). These are genuine open questions emitted by wave-1 gatherers that did not make the load-bearing cut for OPEN_QUESTIONS.md — they concern cult detail, internal periodization, or single-branch follow-ups rather than motif transmission verdicts or tradition origins. Same table format; promote a row to the main register (next free Q number) when it starts blocking a verdict.
| # | Question | Target domain | Status | Emitted by | Suggested gathering action |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| B1 | Can the Göbekli Tepe T-pillars be securely interpreted as anthropomorphic supernatural agents (Schmidt's reading), or are the "faces" modern projection with no consensus iconographic analysis? | 01_prehistoric | open | paleolithic-mortuary-religion | Tier-1 note pairing Schmidt's interpretation with a named critique (Banning 2011's domestic-buildings challenge); resolving this also helps fix the miscategorized paleolithic-mortuary-religion tradition label (BiasAudit #12) |
| B2 | What was the Pre-Sargonic (Early Dynastic) pantheon hierarchy before Ur III scribal systematization, and how did canonization proceed? | 02_mesopotamian | open | sumerian-religion | Tier-1 note on the Fara/Abu Salabikh god-lists (Krebernik's editions) c. 2600 BCE; tier-2 claim on what the lists show pre-systematization |
| B3 | How much of the Sumerian literary corpus was composed orally before writing vs. produced by the literate edubba scribal schools? | 02_mesopotamian | open | sumerian-religion | Tier-1 note on the Old Babylonian edubba context (Michalowski; Veldhuis on curricular texts); tier-2 claim on how scribal-school shaping affects "ancient tradition" claims |
| B4 | Do Badarian west-facing burials reflect solar symbolism (sunset), an explicit afterlife geography, or both — and how can these be distinguished archaeologically? | 03_egyptian | open | ancient-egyptian-religion | Tier-1 note on predynastic burial-orientation studies beyond Stevenson 2009; tier-2 claim stating the discriminating evidence each reading would require |
| B5 | How did maat theology survive the Amarna discontinuity — what changed structurally after Atenism's reversal? | 03_egyptian | open | ancient-egyptian-religion | Tier-1 note on Assmann's maat scholarship plus post-Amarna restoration texts (Tutankhamun Restoration Stela); tier-2 claim on continuity vs. restructuring |
| B6 | Was Atenism genuinely exclusivist (approaching monotheism) or monolatric, with the pantheon remaining ontologically real? | 03_egyptian | open | ancient-egyptian-religion | Rival-source pair per the vault's best pattern: Redford 1984 vs. Hornung's Akhenaten study as tier-1 notes; tier-2 claim — also gives the Egyptian profile a second counter-evidence prong (BiasAudit §2) |
| B7 | Is there a recoverable pre-Odinic stratum of Germanic religion in which *Tîwaz had sky-father attributes? | 04_indo_european | open | dyeus-sky-father-cognate-set | Tier-1 note on runic Tiwaz evidence and Old High German glosses; tier-2 claim on whether Týr's residual status mirrors the Dyaus pattern (feeds Q10) |
| B8 | When did Latin speakers stop analyzing Iūpiter as Djous patēr, and does Roman liturgy preserve other traces of the sky-father formula beyond the name? | 04_indo_european | open | dyeus-sky-father-cognate-set | Tier-1 note on archaic Roman prayer formulae (Watkins's formulaic chapters; Norden); tier-2 claim on formula survival vs. fossilization |
| B9 | Is Per(k)wunos a separate PIE storm deity or a hypostasis of Dyeus — given the ambiguous Vedic split between Indra and Dyaus? | 04_indo_european | open | proto-indo-european-religion | Tier-1 note on the storm-god comparanda (West 2007 ch. 5); tier-2 claim — affects how widely the sky-father motif's boundaries are drawn |
| B10 | How should the vault handle Rigvedic hymns identified as compositionally late (post-codification additions), which the standard linguistic dating methods cannot reach? | 06_dharmic | open | rigveda-oral-gap-composition-vs-attestation (04) | Tier-1 note on Witzel's hymn stratification; add a methodology rule: per-hymn composition labels where stratification is established, corpus-level dates otherwise |
| B11 | What explains regional Yahweh designations ("Yahweh of Samaria," "Yahweh of Teman") — local hypostases of one deity, or a not-yet-unified theological concept in the 9th–8th c. BCE? | 05_abrahamic | open | israelite-religion-origins | Tier-1 note on the Kuntillet Ajrud final report (Meshel 2012) and the hypostasis debate (Sommer); tier-2 claim cross-linked to kuntillet-ajrud-yahweh-asherah-popular-religion |
| B12 | Can the social group and moment of the Deuteronomistic monotheism-from-creation retrospective be identified with precision? | 05_abrahamic | open | israelite-religion-origins | Tier-1 note on Deuteronomistic History scholarship (Römer 2005); tier-2 claim on the dating range and its evidence classes |
| B13 | What is the botanical identity of soma, and does the identification materially change the reconstruction of early Vedic ritual practice? | 06_dharmic | open | vedic-religion | Tier-1 note surveying the candidates with their strongest cases (Falk 1989 on Ephedra; the Amanita and harmaline proposals); tier-2 claim — flag explicitly if the answer turns out not to affect any origin claim |
| B14 | What fills the c. 1900–1500 BCE "dark age" between IVC collapse and the earliest Vedic compositions, archaeologically poorly attested in Punjab and Sindh? | 06_dharmic | open | vedic-religion | Tier-1 note on post-urban Harappan archaeology (Possehl; Cemetery H horizon); tier-2 claim on what the gap permits and forbids for continuity theses (feeds Q16) |
| B15 | What was commoner/non-royal religious practice during the Shang period, given that the oracle-bone corpus is exclusively royal? | 07_east_asian | open | shang-religion | Tier-1 note on non-elite Shang ritual archaeology (Campbell's Anyang work; village-level deposits); tier-2 claim — likely outcome is a well-documented evidential blank, which is itself worth recording |
| B16 | Is the relationship between Longshan burial-complex practice and Shang ancestor worship descent (continuous transmission) or convergence (independent ancestor-focus from similar social structures)? | 07_east_asian | open | shang-religion | Tier-1 note on Neolithic–Bronze mortuary continuity scholarship (Liu Li); tier-2 claim with an explicit transmission verdict — promote to the main register if it starts blocking ancestor-veneration-antiquity-china |
| B17 | Are songline networks ancient or periodically reorganized — do linguistic phylogenies of connected language groups correlate with songline geographies? | 08_indigenous | open | australian-aboriginal-dreaming | Tier-1 note on any study pairing Pama-Nyungan phylogeny with songline routes; tier-2 claim — feeds Q26's anchoring question |
| B18 | How much variation exists across the 250+ language groups — is "the Dreaming" one family of traditions or a scholarly construct imposed on diverse cosmologies? | 08_indigenous | open | australian-aboriginal-dreaming | Tier-1 note on the critique of the "Dreamtime" construct (Wolfe 1991; Swain) as etic historiography; tier-2 claim distinguishing emic diversity from etic labeling |