I read that the blood of the victim – whether lamb, goat, or bullock – was collected in a basin and given ‘to one that should stir it up … so that it should not congeal’. Then the priest, having emerged from the sanctuary, ‘took the blood from him that was stirring it and entered again into the place where he had entered and stood again on the place whereon he had stood, and sprinkled the blood once upwards and seven times downwards.’15
And where, exactly, did the priest sprinkle this blood? According to the Mishnah he sprinkled it ‘on the curtain outside, opposite the Ark, once upwards and seven times downwards, not as though he intended to sprinkle upwards or downwards, but as though he were wielding a whip … He then sprinkled the cleansed surface of the altar seven times and poured out the residue of the blood.’16
It seemed to me highly improbable that Memhir Fisseha had ever read the Mishnah. As a Christian he would have no reason to do so; nor would he have had access to such a book on his remote island; nor could he have understood any of the languages into which it had been translated. Yet his hand movements, when he had shown me how the scattering of the blood was done, had been precisely those of a man wielding a whip. And he had spoken confidently of the blood being poured not only upon the altar stones but also ‘on the tent of the Ark’.
The correspondences were too close to be ignored and I felt sure that at some time in the distant past an object of great religious significance had been brought by Jews to the island of Tana Kirkos. Despite the chronological inconsistency in the supposed date of its arrival, there was also every reason to suppose – as Memhir Fisseha himself had so obviously believed – that that object might indeed have been the Holy Ark of the Covenant.
Chapter 10
Ghost in a Maze
During the discussions on Tana Kirkos a comment that the priest had made to me just before he had got to his main point had aroused my curiosity. That comment – the implications of which I now wanted to investigate further in the library at the Institute of Ethiopian Studies – had been to do with the route that the Ark had followed on its journey to Ethiopia. After being stolen from the Temple of Solomon in Jerusalem, the priest had said, it had first been carried into Egypt and from there had been brought to Lake Tana by way of the Nile and the Takazze rivers. Despite all the research that I had done during the previous few months, I realized that I had never given serious consideration to the question of Menelik’s itinerary. I therefore wanted to see what the Kebra Nagast had to say on the matter. I also wanted to know if there was anything in it that specifically contradicted the priest’s assertion that the Ark had spent eight hundred years at Tana Kirkos before being taken to Axum.
The only relevant information that I could find in the great epic was contained in Chapter 84. There it was reported that Menelik and his travelling companions had brought the sacred relic to a place called Debra Makeda after their arrival in Ethiopia.1 To my surprise there was no mention of Axum whatsoever. ‘Debra Makeda’, wherever it might have been, was clearly and unambiguously highlighted as the Ark’s first home in Ethiopia. At a stroke this cleared up one of the more serious factual inconsistencies that had bothered me since 1983 – namely that the city of Axum had not been founded until about eight hundred years after the date of Menelik’s supposed journey.2 Several of my original informants had told me that Axum had been the final destination of that journey and that the Ark had been lodged there from the outset3 – which, of course, would have been historically impossible. Now, however, I could see that the Kebra Nagast made no such claim and said only that Menelik and his companions had brought the relic from Jerusalem to ‘Debra Makeda’. I knew that the word ‘debra’ meant ‘mountain’ and that ‘Makeda’ was the name given in Ethiopian tradition to the Queen of Sheba. ‘Debra Makeda’ therefore meant ‘Mount Makeda’ – the Queen of Sheba’s mountain.
In the Kebra Nagast’s brief description I saw nothing to suggest that this ‘Queen of Sheba’s Mountain’ might actually have been Tana Kirkos. By the same token, however, I could find nothing that ruled that possibility out. Seeking further clues I then referred to an authoritative geographical survey of Lake Tana carried out in the 1930s and learned that ‘Kirkos’ was a name that had been given to the island in relatively recent times (in honour of a Christian saint). ‘Before the conversion of Ethiopia to Christianity,’ the survey added, ‘Tana Kirkos was called Debra Sehel.’4 The obvious question immediately formed itself in my mind: what, exactly, did Sehel mean?
To find out I consulted several of the scholars who were then studying in the library. They told me that it was a Ge’ez word rooted in the verb ‘to forgive’.
‘Would I be right’, I asked, ‘in assuming that a correct translation of the full name Debra Sehel would be something like “Mount of Forgiveness”?’
‘Yes,’ they replied. ‘That is correct.’
Now this was interesting. In Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival, as I remembered very well, the location of the Grail castle – and of the Grail Temple – was given as Munsalvaesche.5 There had been some debate over the exact interpretation of this word Munsalvaesche; more than one Wolfram expert, however, had suggested that behind it lay ‘the biblical Mons Salvationis, Mount of Salvation’.6
There could be no doubt that the notions of ‘forgiveness’ and ‘salvation’ were linked – since in order to be ‘saved’, in the religious sense, one must first be ‘forgiven’. Moreover, as Psalm 130 puts it: ‘If thou, Lord, shouldest mark iniquities … who shall stand? But there is forgiveness with thee … Let Israel hope in the Lord: for with the Lord there is mercy, and with him is plenteous redemption.’7
‘Redemption’ is, of course, a close synonym for ‘salvation’.8 I therefore could not help but wonder whether Wolfram’s ‘Mount of Salvation’ might not in some way have been associated with Ethiopia’s ‘Mount of Forgiveness’ – now known as Tana Kirkos.
I was fully aware that speculation of this kind could only ever be tenuous and that it was a long jump indeed from Debra Sehel to Munsalvaesche. Nevertheless, after my many readings of Parzival, I could hardly forget that the mystical Grail Temple (‘smooth and rounded as though from a lathe’9) had stood on a lake – and quite possibly on an island on that lake.10 Nor did it seem entirely irrelevant that Ethiopian Orthodox churches and Falasha places of worship were traditionally circular in shape11 – as were the majority of Templar churches (including several still standing to this day such as the twelfth-century Temple Church off London’s Fleet Street). I therefore felt that there were certain correspondences in all of this which it might be unwise for me to ignore entirely (though it would be equally unwise to read too much into them).
Meanwhile there was another and rather less tentative link to consider – that between Debra Sehel and Debra Makeda. As the former name of Tana Kirkos made clear, Ethiopian islands could acquire the prefix Debra (meaning ‘Mount’). And, indeed – rising steeply to a high peak that towered above the surface of the lake – Tana Kirkos had looked to me very much like a mountain when I had first set eyes on it. This certainly did not prove that the Kebra Nagast had been referring to Debra Sehel when it had spoken of the Ark being taken to the Queen of Sheba’s mountain. I reasoned, however, that it did at least elevate the island to the status of a candidate for that distinction.
With this established, I moved on to consider the question of the route that Menelik and his companions had followed on their journey. Previously I had always assumed that the travellers had gone by ship – from Solomon’s port of Eziongeber (modern Elat on the Gulf of Aqaba),12 and thence down the Red Sea to the Ethiopian coast. Now, as I pored over the copy of the Kebra Nagast provided to me by the librarian, I discovered that my earlier assumption had been quite wrong. Menelik’s long journey from Jerusalem had involved a substantial caravan and had been overland throughout.13
But what overland route had been followed? The description of the trek given in the Kebra Nagast had the dreamlike, miraculous and surreal qualit
y of imaginative storytelling, in which recognizable place names and geographical features were not easy to find. Nevertheless there were some details that were both specific and important. After leaving Jerusalem the travellers had first made their way to Gaza (on Israel’s Mediterranean coast, where a city of that name still exists). From there, presumably following the well established trade route across the northern edge of the Sinai peninsula,14 they had crossed into Egypt where, not long afterwards, they had arrived at a great river: ‘Let us let down the wagons,’ they said at this point, ‘for we have come to the water of Ethiopia. This is the Takazze which floweth down from Ethiopia and watereth the valley of Egypt.’15 It was clear from the context that Menelik and his companions were still in ‘the valley of Egypt’ when they uttered these words – and probably not far south of the site of modern Cairo. The river beside which they had let down their wagons could therefore only have been the Nile. What was striking, however, was that they had immediately identified it with the Takazze – the same great Ethiopian tributary that the priest had mentioned to me on Tana Kirkos.
From the librarian I obtained an atlas and traced the Takazze’s course with my fingertip. I found that it rose in Abyssinia’s central highlands not far from the ancient town of Lalibela, took a winding path in a north-westerly direction through the Simien mountains, merged with the Atbara in the Sudan, and finally joined the Nile proper some hundreds of miles to the north of the modern city of Khartoum (which stands at the confluence of the Blue and White Niles).
Looking at the map I could immediately see two other things: first that the Nile – from an Ethiopian perspective – might easily have come to be regarded as an extension of the Takazze;16 secondly that it would have been entirely sensible for the caravan carrying the Ark of the Covenant to have followed the Nile and then the Takazze in order to reach Ethiopia. The alternative would have been to proceed much further southwards through the hostile deserts of the Sudan as far as the confluence of the two Niles and then to follow the Blue Nile into the highlands. However – since the latter river makes a wide curving detour to the south before turning north again towards Lake Tana – this would have required an unnecessarily lengthy expedition; the Takazze route, by contrast, was the best part of a thousand miles shorter.
The map made something else clear as well: a group of travellers following the Takazze to its headwaters would, near the end of their journey, have reached a point less than seventy miles from the eastern shore of Lake Tana. And Tana Kirkos lay not far off that same eastern shore. There was thus no mystery surrounding the tradition that the little island had been the first resting place of the Ark in Ethiopia: indeed, casting around for somewhere safe and close to install the sacred relic, Menelik and his companions could hardly have made a better choice.
Three men in a boat
The next morning when Richard Pankhurst and I travelled to Lake Zwai we were accompanied by an old friend of mine, Yohannes Berhanu, the General Manager of the state-owned National Tour Operation. The three of us met up just before 6 a.m. at the NTO offices, where Yohannes had thoughtfully provided a chauffeur-driven Toyota Landcruiser. Twenty minutes later we had left the slums and skyscrapers of Addis Ababa behind and were rumbling along the broad highway that led south through the town of Debra Zeit into the heart of the Great Rift Valley.
Discounting the Koka reservoir, which is man-made, Lake Zwai is the northernmost of Ethiopia’s string of Rift Valley lakes. It has a surface area of some two hundred square miles and a maximum depth of about fifty feet. Oval in shape, it is studded with islands and has marshy shores overgrown with reeds that provide an ideal habitat for storks, pelicans, wild ducks, geese and fish eagles – as well as for great numbers of hippopotami.
Our destination, after the two-hour drive from Addis Ababa, was a jetty on the southern side of the lake. Here we had been told that the Ministry of Fisheries owned and operated a number of boats, one of which would surely be provided for us at minimal cost. Predictably, however, all the larger vessels had gone fishing. Only a single small motorboat was available – and there was no fuel for its outboard engine.
A lengthy palaver followed with the Ministry staff who explained that the motorboat wasn’t really big enough to take Richard, Yohannes and me as well as a pilot. Debra Zion, the island to which I had been told that the Ark had been brought for safekeeping in the tenth century, was distant: at least a three-hour journey in this humble craft. Furthermore, with no deck to shelter under, we would be grievously afflicted by the sun. Perhaps, therefore, we would care to come back tomorrow when more suitable transport could be arranged?
Yohannes vehemently declined this suggestion. Professor Pankhurst and Mr Hancock, he said, had important appointments in Addis Ababa tomorrow – appointments which could not under any circumstances be altered. We must, therefore, reach Debra Zion today.
More discussions followed and eventually we trooped along the jetty and sat experimentally in the tiny motorboat. Arranged around its sides we did more or less fit into it, although our combined weight forced it rather low in the water.
What to do? The Fisheries officials seemed dubious but at last agreed to let us have our way. The vessel was ours. They would provide a pilot. And there would be no charge. We, however, would have to arrange for the fuel ourselves. Perhaps we could send our driver into the nearest town with a jerrycan?
We did this. A vast and completely inexplicable delay then ensued. One hour passed. Then another. Growing impatient I stood at the end of the jetty and made the acquaintance of several marabou storks: huge, lugubrious, long-beaked, bald-headed birds obviously descended from pterodactyls. Finally our driver returned with the necessary fuel and – just after 11 a.m. – we started up the outboard motor and set off.
We puttered, very slowly, through the rippling waters, passing one densely wooded island, then another. The reed-fringed shoreline receded and then disappeared behind us, there was no sign of Debra Zion, the sun was now directly overhead, and the boat was leaking in a small but noticeable way.
At this point Yohannes Berhanu rather pointedly reminded us that the lake was full of hippopotami (which he described as ‘very aggressive and untrustworthy animals’). He was, I observed, wearing a life-jacket that he must somehow have acquired before our departure from the jetty. Meanwhile, Richard Pankhurst’s nose was turning an interesting shade of lobster pink. And I … well I was gritting my teeth and trying to ignore the implications of an increasingly full bladder. Where was that bloody island? And when exactly were we going to get there? I looked impatiently at my watch and was suddenly overtaken by a faint but definite sense of the ridiculous. I mean, Raiders of the Lost Ark was one thing but this, to be honest, was more like Three Men in a Boat.
The journey to Debra Zion did not take as long as we had been told it would; nevertheless it took quite long enough and I was the first on to dry land when we finally arrived. I dashed past the delegation of monks waiting to greet us, disappeared behind the nearest bush and emerged again some minutes later feeling very much better.
When I rejoined the others, who were deep in conversation with the welcoming committee, I noticed a number of papyrusreed boats lined up along the shore. They seemed identical in every respect to those I had seen on Lake Tana. I was on the point of asking about this when Yohannes interrupted my chain of thought by announcing excitedly: ‘Graham. There is something strange here. It seems that the mother-tongue of these people is Tigrigna.’
This was strange indeed. We were now in the southern part of the province of Shoa, an Amharic-speaking area. Tigrigna, on the other hand, was the language of the sacred city of Axum and of the province of Tigray – hundreds of miles to the north. I knew from direct experience that Ethiopia was a country in which regional distinctions, particularly linguistic distinctions, had very profound implications (profound enough, anyway, to lead to civil war). It was therefore most surprising to find that Amharic was not the first language of the monks of Debra Zion.
Nor, as it turned out, did this peculiarity apply only to the monks. We quickly established that every inhabitant of the island, including the farmers and the fishermen, routinely conversed in a dialect of Tigrigna and only used Amharic (which many of them did not speak at all well) on the rare occasions when they were visited by government officials.
As we hiked up the winding path to the top of the hill where Debra Zion’s main church was sited I asked: ‘How come you all speak Tigrigna?’
‘Because our forefathers came from Tigray,’ the monks replied through the medium of Yohannes.
‘When did they come?’
‘It was around one thousand and thirty years ago.’
I did some quick mental arithmetic. One thousand and thirty years from 1989 gave a date of AD 959. The tenth century, I thought. The century in which Queen Gudit had overthrown the Solomonic dynasty and in which the Ark of the Covenant had supposedly been taken out of Axum and brought to Debra Zion for safekeeping. Without really having begun to interview anybody it was already beginning to look very much as though the tradition reported to me by Belai Gedai had some substance to it.
‘Why did they come?’ I asked next. ‘Get them to tell us the story of how and why they came here.’
Yohannes put this to the monks and then translated their answer: ‘You see, their forefathers came here with the tabot. It was in the time of Gudit. She attacked the Christians in Tigray. There was much fighting. They were escaping from her. And they came here with the tabot.’
‘Which tabot?’
‘They say it was the tabot from the Church of Saint Mary of Zion in Axum.’
‘By that do they mean the original tabot that was brought by Menelik from Jerusalem to Ethiopia? The Ark of the Covenant in other words. Or do they have some other tabot in mind? I want to be absolutely clear on this point.’
The Sign and the Seal Page 25