Iran's earliest script survives on about 1,600–1,700 accounting tablets; its numbers are read, but whether its other signs write words, and how it relates to Linear Elamite, is disputed.

Whether the short Harappan inscriptions record speech at all has been argued with entropy statistics for two decades; no test yet separates writing from emblem systems decisively.

Egypt traded by sea with Punt for over a thousand years, for incense, ebony, gold and baboons, but whether it lay in Africa, Arabia or both remains disputed.

The city from which Sargon and his successors ruled Mesopotamia c. 2300 BCE has never been securely located, despite more than a century of searching in central Iraq.

Competing High, Middle, Low and Ultra-Low chronologies place Hammurabi and the fall of Babylon up to about 150 years apart; no single model integrates all the evidence.

Minoan Linear A can be roughly sounded out through Linear B values, but no proposed language family has been shown to fit better than random controls.

Of roughly 4,000 to 4,500 distinct graphs in the Shang divination inscriptions, only about 1,100 to 1,700 are generally accepted as read; most of the rest are rare and unread.

More than forty proposed dates for King Wu's victory over the last Shang king span over a century, and the official choice of 1046 BCE remains disputed.

Meroitic script has been readable since Griffith's work of 1909–1911, but outside formulaic texts the language of the Kingdom of Kush is still largely untranslated.

Ptolemy's catalogue of about 1,025 stars claims his own observations; statistical anomalies suggest much of it derives from Hipparchus three centuries earlier.

Roman census totals jump from about 910,000 in 70/69 BCE to 4,063,000 in 28 BCE; whether this reflects a change in who was counted or real growth remains disputed.

Many Galenic works lost in Greek were translated into Syriac and Arabic in ninth-century Baghdad; some may survive in unedited manuscripts or in quotations not yet traced to their source.

A third-century Chinese account describes the Wa polity ruled by Himiko, but its itinerary cannot be followed literally and the Kyushu and Nara candidates have been argued since the Edo period.

Ancient DNA confirms Yersinia pestis caused the First Pandemic (541–c.750), but estimates of its mortality and long-term consequences range from catastrophic to modest.

Islamic tradition credits the caliph ʿUthmān (c. 650); some scholars place closure under ʿAbd al-Malik and al-Ḥajjāj (c. 700) or later. Manuscript evidence is now testing these positions.

Proposed dates for the poem range from about 700 to the early eleventh century, the date of its only manuscript, and rest on metre, language, palaeography and historical context.

Frankish 'Gregorian' and city-of-Rome 'Old Roman' chant share texts and melodic outlines but differ in detail, and Roman melodies were written down only from 1071.

Robert Hartwell's estimate of about 125,000 tons of iron in 1078 is widely repeated, but it rests on fiscal records whose relation to total output is disputed.

Gunpowder formulas appear in China by 1044 and in Arabic and Latin texts by the later 1200s, but the path between them is unattested.

Several of the largest volcanic sulfate deposits of the last millennium, in 1230, 1286, 1458, 1695 and 1809, have no securely identified source volcano.

Copernicus used devices found earlier in al-Ṭūsī and Ibn al-Shāṭir, but no document shows how a text containing them reached him or his teachers.

The account of thirty years' travel dictated to Ibn Juzayy in 1354–55 mixes eyewitness report with borrowed passages, and several legs, from the Volga to China, remain doubted.

Plague devastated Egypt and North Africa in 1347–49, but whether it crossed the Sahara or reached the Horn and East Africa is unresolved.

Madhava's school derived power series for π, sine and cosine before 1500; whether Jesuits in Kerala carried them to Europe remains undocumented.

Geology and archaeology show two great tsunamis struck northern Sumatra around 1394 and 1450, but no contemporary text describing either has been identified.

Andean knotted cords encode numbers in a known decimal system; whether colour, ply, attachment and knot direction also record names, categories or narrative remains open.

The undeciphered glyphs carved on about two dozen wooden objects from Rapa Nui may be a pre-contact invention of writing or a nineteenth-century response to European literacy.

Glyph-level variation in the earliest Mainz types has been read both as evidence against the punch, matrix and hand mould, and as fully compatible with it.

Estimates of the share of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century editions that survive in no copy vary widely, and depend on statistical models that have rarely been tested against later discoveries.

Estimates of the hemisphere's population on the eve of contact run from about 8 million to over 100 million, and the scale of the collapse depends on which is right.

The best current estimate, 2.5 to 5 million enslaved Indigenous people, is the only hemispheric figure, and it rests on regional extrapolation rather than a count.

The dates, ranges and causes of extinction of the dodo, great auk, Steller's sea cow, passenger pigeon and Carolina parakeet still rest on thin, contested written records.

Whether the richest regions of China and India matched England before 1750 depends on wage series built from a few scattered price and wage quotations.

European slave trading in the Indian Ocean has been tentatively counted, but the combined volume of Dutch, Portuguese, French, British, Arab, Swahili and South Asian trades remains unknown.

Tax surveys show rapid growth in Anatolia to about 1580, but whether the decline that followed was a demographic collapse or an artefact of changing registration remains unsettled.

Two epidemics that Nahua and Spanish observers called cocoliztli killed a large share of central Mexico's Indigenous population, and their cause, whether a native haemorrhagic fever, enteric fever or something else, is disputed.

Estimates of the share of Spanish American silver that ended up in China vary widely because mint, shipping and Chinese monetary records have never been reconciled in one account.

Late Ming population estimates run from about 150 million to over 200 million, so the scale of the mid-seventeenth-century collapse remains uncertain by tens of millions.

Contemporary claims of 154,000 to 300,000 Protestant victims are rejected, but the modern figure of roughly 4,000 killed has never been built from a full victim-level count.

Rawski's 1979 estimate of 30–45 percent male literacy in Qing China has never been tested against a systematic count of signatures and marks on contracts.

After nearly four centuries of recurring epidemics, plague retreated from western and central Europe between the 1660s and the 1720s while persisting in the Ottoman Mediterranean, and no explanation commands agreement.

Optical effects, perspective geometry and technical imaging have been read for and against Vermeer's use of a camera obscura, with no documentary evidence either way.

Most of Newton's million words on alchemy copy or digest named authors, but several recipe collections and a dialogue among his papers derive from exemplars no one has identified.

Sloane's catalogues attribute remedies and drug samples to 'a Negro', 'an Indian druggist' or an unnamed ship's doctor; few of these informants have been traced to named people.

Many thousands of British books and pamphlets of 1695 to 1800 name no printer or a fictitious one; ornaments and damaged type can now identify the presses at scale.

Letters between the US Army's senior general and Spanish Louisiana, written in a code keyed to an unidentified printed dictionary, remain partly or wholly unread.

Fisher showed in 1936 that Mendel's ratios fit theory improbably well; a century of explanations has not produced documentary evidence of how the counts were made.

Leather strips offered to Berlin and the British Museum in 1883 were dismissed as forgeries and then lost; since 2021 scholars have again argued they preserved a pre-biblical text.

The last known thylacine died in a Hobart zoo in September 1936, but whether the species survived in the Tasmanian bush into the 1940s, the 1980s or later remains disputed.