From the moment we climbed down from the Landcruiser we were besieged by women and children all shouting ‘Shalom, Shalom’ – which, it quickly transpired, was just about the only word of Hebrew that they knew. With Balcha steadfastly refusing to interpret for us, we at first had some difficulty in communicating; soon, however, we found a young man who spoke some English and, in exchange for a small sum of money, he agreed to show us around.
There was not much to see. Sprawled up a slope at the side of the road, the village – it was called Weleka – was dirty and seething with flies. Many of the people who pressed around us seemed to think that we ourselves must be Jewish and that we had come to take them away to Israel. Others ran towards us with armloads of souvenirs – for the most part baked clay representations of the Star of David and of the supposed bed-time scene between Solomon and Sheba. The plaintive earnestness with which these items were touted touched me and I asked our guide how long it had been since there had been any foreigners here to buy their goods. ‘Not since year before,’ he replied.
In the short time we had at our disposal we photographed what we could. Here a loom stood positioned for a weaver above a hole in the ground; there pieces of iron lay scattered around a fire, in the flickering flames of which a blacksmith was forging an axe-head; in one hut clay was being baked; in another we found a woman at work fashioning pottery. The Amharas, Balcha told us later, despised such lowly trades – indeed, in their language, the word for ‘manual worker’ (tabib) had the same meaning as ‘one with the evil eye’.
By the time we left Weleka I felt thoroughly jaded. Partly prompted by what Richard Pankhurst had told me about the medieval history of the Falashas, and partly because I was intrigued by the possible connection of this people to the Ark of the Covenant story that I had heard in Axum, I had built up some rather unrealistic and extravagant expectations. A romantic at heart, I had nurtured dreams of encountering a noble and ancient Judaic civilization. The reality, however, seemed to be a degraded and impoverished peasant culture overanxious to pander to the enthusiasms of foreigners. Even the place of worship, which the Falashas called a mesgid, turned out to be filled with chintzy gifts from Israel: boxes of matsos were stacked in one corner and nobody could read the Torah – which had been printed in Tel Aviv – because it was written in Hebrew.
Just before we drove away I bought one of the miniature sculptures of Solomon and Sheba in bed together. I have it still. At the time I remember thinking that its cheap workmanship and sentimental imagery appropriately symbolized the deficiencies of the legend itself. Disappointed and disenchanted I glowered out of the window of the Landcruiser as we motored back into Gondar.
Coup de grâce
By the end of 1983 I had entirely lost interest in the Axumite claim to the Ark of the Covenant. The coup de grâce, however, was not delivered by the tawdry Falasha village but by what I saw when I followed up the one issue still outstanding after the completion of our field work – the question of the tabots, the replicas of the Ark, which were lodged in every Ethiopian Christian church. This custom had struck me as being of possible relevance and I wanted to find out more about it.
I raised the matter in the late autumn of 1983 on a visit that I made to Richard Pankhurst’s home in London’s elegant Hampstead district. Over tea and biscuits the historian confirmed that tabots were indeed supposed to be replicas of the Ark and added: ‘It’s a most curious tradition. As far as I’m aware there’s no precedent for it in any other brand of Christianity.’
I asked if he knew how long tabots had been in use in Ethiopia. He replied that he honestly had no idea. ‘The first historical mention was probably made by Father Francisco Alvarez who visited the north of the country in the sixteenth century. But it’s clear that he was witnessing a tradition that was already very old at that time.’
Richard then pulled down from his bookshelf a slim volume, printed in 1970, entitled The Ethiopian Orthodox Church. ‘This is an official church publication,’ he said, ‘let’s have a look and see if it offers any enlightenment on the subject.’
There was no index, but we checked first in a chapter entitled ‘The Consecration of a Church’. Here I read:
The consecration of a church is a solemn and impressive ceremony with rites symbolic of the sacred uses to which the edifice is dedicated. The various parts of the service are of very ancient date … The Tabot, or Ark, previously consecrated by the Patriarch, is installed with grandeur and is the chief feature of the ceremony.2
In another chapter, ‘Church Buildings’, I came across this passage: ‘It is the Tabot which gives sanctity to the church in which it is placed.’3 Finally, in the glossary, I found the word tabot defined simply as ‘Ark of the Covenant’.4
I next asked Richard if he had any idea what tabots looked like. ‘The Bible says that the original Ark of the Covenant was a wood and gold box about the size of a tea-chest. Do the tabots fit that description?’
‘Well, no, I’m afraid they don’t. Of course lay people aren’t supposed to see them at all. Even when they’re brought out in procession they’re always covered in cloth wrappings. But they’re certainly much smaller than the biblical description. We needn’t speculate on this though. You can go and see some tabots for yourself at the British Museum. They were looted from Ethiopia during the Napier Expedition to Magdala in the nineteenth century and brought back to England. I don’t think they’re on public display any more, but you’ll find them in the Ethnographic Store in Hackney.’
The next morning, after I had made a few phone calls, I drove over to Orsman Road, London NI, where the Ethnographic Store was located. It was a modern and fundamentally unattractive building with quite a high level of security: ‘People sometimes try to break in here and nick our stuff,’ explained the caretaker as I signed in.
He took me in a lift to one of the upper floors and then into an enormous warehouse of a room completely filled with rows of metal filing racks. These extended from floor to ceiling and were separated only by narrow walkways badly lit by overhead fluorescent tubes. The caretaker now consulted a voluminous index, muttering incomprehensibly to himself as he did so. ‘I think it’s this way,’ he said finally. ‘Follow me.’
As we walked I was reminded irresistibly of the closing scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark – the scene in which the sacred relic is sealed in a wooden crate and dumped in a federal depository amidst thousands of other anonymous containers. This parallel continued when, after quite a few false turns in the maze of shelves, we finally arrived at the right spot. Here, with a certain amount of ceremony, the caretaker pulled out … a large box.
I felt a thrill of excitement as he opened it up. Inside, however, there was nothing that bore even the remotest resemblance to my image of the Ark of the Covenant. Separated by sheets of crêpe paper there were, instead, nine wooden slabs, some square, some rectangular, none exceeding eighteen inches in length and width, and none more than three inches thick. The majority were very plain but all bore writing which I recognized as Ge’ez, the ancient liturgical language of Ethiopia. A few were additionally engraved with crosses and other devices.
I asked the caretaker to check his index. Could he possibly have made a mistake? Could we be looking at the wrong things?
He squinted at the list in his hands, then replied: ‘No. No mistake. These are your tabots all right. From the Holmes collection. Brought back by the British Expedition to Abyssinia in 1867/8. That’s what it says here.’
I thanked him for his trouble and left, satisfied that I had finally laid the whole matter to rest. These pathetic lumps of wood were supposed to be replicas of the sacred relic in the sanctuary chapel at Axum. Whatever that relic might be, therefore, one thing was now absolutely clear: it was not the Ark of the Covenant.
‘So that’s the end of that,’ I remember thinking as I stepped out on to Orsman Road and ran to my car through a dismal shower of rain.
I could not have been more wrong.
Part II: Europe, 1989
Holy Ark
and Holy Grail
Chapter 3
The Grail Cipher
It was in 1983 that I visited Axum and learned at first hand about Ethiopia’s audacious claim to be the last resting place of the Ark of the Covenant. I had been living in Africa at the time. In 1984 I moved to England with my family. Nevertheless in the years that followed I continued to travel regularly to Addis Ababa, producing a number of publications for the government and generally strengthening my contacts with those in power – including President Mengistu Haile Mariam himself. The dictator had a bad reputation for abusing human rights but I cultivated him assiduously and won a number of useful privileges as a result – notably access to many areas that were normally closed to foreigners. If I had wanted to look further into the Ark mystery there is no doubt that I would have been strongly placed to do so. I was just not interested, however. I therefore did not feel even a twinge of regret when, at the end of 1988, the forces of the Tigray People’s Liberation Front launched a massive offensive against Axum and captured it in a single day of bloody hand-to-hand fighting – during which more than two thousand of the governments troops were killed or captured. At that stage my involvement with the Mengistu regime had become so close that the rebels’ success meant the doors of the sacred city were now effectively closed to me. But I had no particular reason to want to go back there anyway. Or at least so I thought.
The Queen of Sheba at Chartres
I spent most of the second half of 1988 and the first quarter of 1989 writing the accompanying commentary for an illustrated book focussing on the historic northern regions of Ethiopia and on the religious ceremonies and customs of the peoples living there. This project was not commissioned by the government but was the work of two internationally renowned photographers, Angela Fisher and Carol Beckwith1 – both of whom were close friends of mine.
Because of the nature of the subject, I had to do some quite detailed background research into several different ethnic groups – amongst them the Falashas, the indigenous black Jews of the Ethiopian highlands whom I had first encountered in 1983. At the same time, because of its formative role in Abyssinian religious culture, I found it necessary to read an ancient text to which Professor Richard Pankhurst had long before drawn my attention. Called the Kebra Nagast (‘Glory of Kings’) this text dated from the thirteenth century AD and had originally been written in Ge’ez. It contained the earliest-surviving version of the story told to me in Axum about the Queen of Sheba and King Solomon, the birth of their son Menelik, and the eventual abduction of the Ark of the Covenant from the First Temple in Jerusalem. An English translation had been made in the 1920s by Sir E. A. Wallis Budge, formerly Keeper of Egyptian and Assyrian Antiquities at the British Museum. It was out of print, but I managed to obtain a photocopy which I studied closely and drew on at various stages in the book I was writing.
My manuscript was not finalized until the end of March 1989. In April, wanting a complete break, I went on holiday to France with my family. We hired a car in Paris and then, with no particular itinerary in mind, headed south. Our first stop was Versailles where we spent a couple of days looking at the palace and at the châteaux. Then we went on to Chartres, a lovely old town in the département of Eure-et-Loire that is famous for its Gothic cathedral – a cathedral dedicated, like the great church at Axum, to Saint Mary the Mother of Christ.
Chartres has been an important Christian site since at least the sixth century AD and a focal point for the cult of the Madonna since the ninth century when Charles the Bald, grandson of the famous Charlemagne, presented the town with its most precious religious relic – a veil said to have been worn by Mary when she gave birth to Jesus. In the eleventh century the church built by Charles the Bald was burnt down and a new, much enlarged, cathedral was erected on its foundations. Following classical, ‘Romanesque’ design principles that emphasized horizontal solidity, this cathedral, too, was badly damaged by fire. Subsequently, during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, its surviving shell was extensively modified and enlarged in the new, soaring, upward-striving style that came to be known as ‘Gothic’. Indeed the high north tower of Chartres cathedral, completed in the year 1134, is thought to be the world’s earliest example of Gothic architecture.2 The south tower was added over the next two decades, as were further features such as the west-facing Royal Portal. Then, in a concentrated burst of building between 1194 and 1225 most of the rest of the superb Gothic exterior was put in place – remaining intact and virtually unaltered ever since.3
When I visited Chartres with my family in April 1989 I was initially much less interested in the history of the cathedral than in its spectacular and glorious beauty. It was such a vast construction, with so much complex sculpture around its walls, that I realized it might take a lifetime to get to know it properly. We had other things to do and see, however, and decided to stay in the town for just three days before moving on towards the south.
I spent the greater part of those three days walking slowly around the cathedral, gradually imbibing its powerful and numinous atmosphere – the remarkable stained glass windows telling biblical stories and illuminating the inner gloom with strange patterns of light, the enigmatic labyrinth mapped out with paving stones in the centre of the nave, the flying buttresses supporting the soaring walls, the pointed arches, and the overwhelming sensation of harmony and proportion conveyed by the grace and agility of the architecture.
Guidebooks that I had purchased stressed that nothing was accidental here. The entire edifice had been carefully and explicitly designed as a key to the deeper religious mysteries. Thus, for example, the architects and masons had made use of gematria (an ancient Hebrew cipher that substitutes numbers for the letters of the alphabet) to ‘spell out’ obscure liturgical phrases in many of the key dimensions of the great building.4 Similarly the sculptors and glaziers – working usually to the instructions of the higher clergy – had carefully concealed complex messages about human nature, about the past, and about the prophetic meaning of the Scriptures in the thousands of different devices and designs that they had created. The statues and windows were in themselves works of art and beauty that were capable, at the most superficial level of understanding, of providing satisfaction, moral guidance and even entertainment to the viewer. The challenge, however, was to delve deeper and to decode the information concealed beneath the more obvious surface interpretations of this or that set of sculptures, this or that arrangement of stained glass.5
I was initially rather unconvinced by arguments like these and found it hard to accept that there could be anything more to the building than its outward appearance. Gradually, however, as I explored further and joined several specialist tours, I began to see that the vast structure was indeed a kind of ‘book in stone’ – an intricate and provocative opus that could be approached and understood at several different levels.
Soon enough, therefore, I too started to play the game – and several times entertained myself by trying to work out the deeper significance of various pieces of statuary that caught my eye. When I thought I had found the correct answer to a particular arrangement or tableau I would then check in the guidebooks to see whether I was right or not.
Then something unexpected happened. Opposite the cathedral’s south porch I stopped for a snack in a café called La Reine de Saba. My recent reading of the Kebra Nagast containing the Ethiopian legend of the Queen of Sheba was still fresh in my mind and I asked one of the waiters why this name had been chosen.
‘Because there is a sculpture of the Queen of Sheba in the porch over there,’ he explained.
My curiosity aroused, I crossed the road and climbed the seventeen steps to the ornate porch – which consisted of a wide central archway sandwiched between two slightly narrower bays. Here, on almost every available square inch of masonry, were hundreds and hundreds of statuettes and many full-size statues. I could find none, however, that seemed obviously to
represent the Queen of Sheba. I therefore checked in the guidebooks I had with me, the most detailed of which, Chartres: Guide of the Cathedral, told me where to look:
The inner archivolt of the outer arch has twenty-eight statuettes of kings and queens of the Old Testament: we recognise David with his harp, Solomon with a sceptre, and the Queen of Sheba holding a flower in her left hand. At the top, the four major prophets, bearded, talk with four minor prophets who are clean shaven.6
The book also informed me that the whole of the south porch had been built in the first quarter of the thirteenth century – the same century in which the Kebra Nagast had been compiled in Ethiopia to tell the story of the Queen of Sheba, Menelik and the theft of the Ark.
This struck me as an amusing coincidence and I therefore examined the statuette of the Queen of Sheba with some considerable interest. I could see absolutely nothing about it, however, that made it special in any way – other than the fact that it seemed to be a little out of place in the august company of a large number of Jewish monarchs and prophets. I knew that according to the Kebra Nagast the queen had been converted to Judaism,7 but I also knew that the relatively short biblical account of her visit to Jerusalem made no mention of this. In Chapter 10 of the book of Kings and in Chapter 9 of the book of Chronicles – the only places where she was specifically named in the Scriptures – she arrived at Solomon’s court a heathen and apparently left there a heathen still.8 It was her paganism, therefore, that made her the odd one out – unless, of course, the builders of Chartres cathedral had been familiar with the Ethiopian story of her conversion. This, however, seemed most unlikely – indeed the Old Testament did not even hint that she might have come from Ethiopia at all and the majority of scholars believed her to have been a South Arabian monarch who had hailed quite specifically from Saba or Sabaea in what is now the Yemen.9
The Sign and the Seal Page 5