In those days the staircase leading down to the ‘Well of Souls’ had not yet been installed and Parker and his team had to lower themselves and their equipment by means of ropes fastened to the Shetiyyah itself. They then lit storm lanterns and began to hack away at the floor of the grotto in the hope that they might thus gain access to the lasting resting place of the Ark.
Disaster struck before they had even begun to establish whether other hollows lay beneath them. Though Sheikh Khalil, the hereditary guardian, had been bought off, another mosque attendant unexpectedly appeared (the story goes that he had decided to sleep on the Temple Mount because his own home was full of guests). Hearing the sound of digging from the Dome of the Rock he burst in, peered down into the Well of Souls and, to his horror, saw a number of wild-eyed foreigners attacking the holy ground with picks and shovels.
The reaction, on both sides, was dramatic. The shocked mosque attendant uttered a piercing howl and fled screaming into the night to rally the faithful. The Englishmen, wisely realizing that the game was up, also beat a hasty retreat. Not even bothering to return to their base camp, they left Jerusalem at once and made for the port of Jaffa – where, conveniently, a motoryacht that they had chartered lay moored in the harbour. In this way they managed to cheat the hysterical mob that arrived at the Temple Mount only moments after their departure and that carried off the unfortunate Sheikh Khalil to an unspeakable fate.
Before morning there were full-scale riots in Jerusalem and Amzey Bey Pasha – who was rightly suspected of complicity – had been assaulted and insulted. His response was to close the Temple Mount and to issue orders that the treasure hunters should be apprehended on their arrival at Jaffa. No doubt he took this latter step in part to assuage his guilty conscience. However, rumours had spread that Parker had found and abducted the Ark of the Covenant, and Muslim and Jewish leaders were vociferous in their demands that the sacred relic must not be allowed to leave the country.
Alerted by telegraph, the Jaffa police and customs authorities arrested the fugitives, impounded all their belongings and made an extremely thorough search. They found nothing. Somewhat nonplussed by this they then locked the baggage up but allowed the Englishmen to row out to their yacht, in the salubrious surroundings of which, it had been agreed, the interrogation would continue. As soon as he and his colleagues were safely on board, however, Parker ordered the crew to weigh anchor.
A few weeks later he was back in England. He had failed to find the lost Ark, but he had succeeded in losing the entire $125,000 with which investors in the United States and Britain had entrusted him.120 ‘The whole episode, and excavations,’ Kathleen Kenyon concluded many years later, ‘did not redound to the credit of British archaeology.’121
British archaeologists, however, were not involved in the next attempt to find the Ark, which took place in the 1920s and which focussed on Mount Nebo where, according to the book of Maccabees, the prophet Jeremiah had concealed the sacred relic just before the destruction of Solomon’s Temple.
The prime mover on this occasion was an eccentric American explorer who liked to dress up in flowing Arab robes and who, though male, went by the curious name of Antonia Frederick Futterer. After thoroughly surveying Mount Nebo (and also its neighbouring peak Mount Pisgah) he claimed – with truly awe-inspiring originality – to have found … a secret passage. This passage was blocked by a wall of some sort and Futterer did not attempt to break it down. When he examined it by flashlight, however, he discovered … an ancient inscription, which he faithfully copied and carried back to Jerusalem. There he made contact with a ‘scholar’ at the Hebrew University who helpfully deciphered the hieroglyphs for him. The message read:
HEREIN LIES THE GOLDEN ARK OF THE COVENANT
Unfortunately Futterer would not name the scholar who had produced this translation; nor, in the furore that followed, did anyone step forward to claim that honour; nor was Futterer subsequently able to produce the copy that he claimed to have made of the inscription; nor did he ever go back to Mount Nebo to retrieve the Ark from its alleged secret passage.122
Half a century later, however, a new champion emerged to pick up the baton that Futterer had dropped. That champion, too, was an American explorer, Tom Crotser by name, whose previous ‘discoveries’ had included the Tower of Babel, Noah’s Ark, and the City of Adam. In 1981, by rather circuitous means, this gentleman acquired some papers that Futterer had left, papers which apparently included a sketch of the walled-up secret passage on Mount Nebo where the Ark of the Covenant was supposed to lie buried.123
Mount Nebo is located just inside the border of the modern state of Jordan and it was to that country that Crotser now flew, together with a group of zealous colleagues from an organization known as the ‘Institute for Restoring History International’ (headquarters: Winfield, Kansas).124 Their mission, of course, was to salvage the Ark. To this end they spent four days sleeping rough on Mount Nebo – much to the consternation of the Franciscans of Terra Santa who own the summit, who guard the Byzantine church that was erected there over the supposed burial place of Moses, and who, for the past several decades, have conducted careful and professional archaeological excavations in the area.125
Needless to say, the Franciscans have never found the Ark, and nor did Crotser – at least not on Mount Nebo. After finishing there, however, he and his team moved on to neighbouring Mount Pisgah (which Futterer had also visited). On that peak they stumbled upon a gully which they were confident would give them access to the ‘secret passage’ identified in Futterer’s sketch.
The fact that part of the floor of the gully was blocked by a length of tin sheeting only added to their excitement. On the night of 31 October 1981 they removed this flimsy obstacle and, sure enough, a passage stretched ahead of them. They followed the passage, which they said was about four feet wide and seven feet high, for a distance of some six hundred feet into the bowels of the earth. There they came across a wall exactly like the one that Futterer had described and, without further ado, they broke it down.
Beyond it was a rock-hewn crypt measuring roughly seven feet by seven feet and containing, according to Crotser, a gold-covered rectangular chest measuring sixty-two inches long, thirty-seven inches wide and thirty-seven inches high. Beside it, apparently, were carrying poles exactly matching the biblical description of the carrying poles of the Ark of the Covenant. And off to one side lay cloth-wrapped packages which Crotser assumed to be the cherubim that, in times gone by, had been mounted upon the mercy seat.
The Americans were certain that they had found the sacred relic. They did not remove it; neither did they touch it or open it; using flash-guns, however, they did take colour photographs of it. Then they left Jordan and returned to the USA where they immediately informed the press agency UPI about their discovery. The result was an internationally syndicated news story which, according to the journalist responsible, ‘got more play than anything I wrote in my life.’126
So, had the Ark really been found? Obviously the photographs taken in the crypt were crucial evidence that might vindicate the sensational claim that the Americans had made – if suitably qualified biblical archaeologists were given the opportunity to study them. It was therefore difficult to understand why Crotser steadfastly refused to release these pictures to anyone. Few were convinced by his argument that God had instructed him to give them only to the London banker David Rothschild who, he said, was a direct descendant of Jesus Christ and had been chosen by the Lord to build the Third Temple – in which the Ark of the Covenant, retrieved from its hiding place, would occupy centre stage.127
A member of the same international banking family that had opposed Montague Parker’s excavations at the Temple Mount in 1910, Rothschild icily declined to take delivery of the photographs – which Crotser still keeps in his home in Winfield, Kansas, which he still refuses to release, but which he will show to selected visitors.
In 1982, one such visitor was the respected archaeologist Siegfri
ed H. Horn, a specialist on the Mount Nebo area and the author of more than a dozen scholarly books.128 He spent some time closely examining Crotser’s photographs which, unfortunately, seemed to have come out of the development process rather badly:
All but two showed absolutely nothing. Of the two that registered images, one is fuzzy but does depict a chamber with a yellow box in the centre. The other slide is quite good and gives a clear view of the front of the box.129
Immediately after leaving Crotser’s house, Horn (who is an accomplished draughtsman) made a sketch of the box as he had observed it in the slide. Some parts of the yellow metal overlay appeared to him to be brass, not gold, and, moreover, were stamped with a diamond pattern that looked machine-worked. More damning by far, however, was the fact that a nail with a modern style of head could be seen protruding out of the upper right corner of the front of the box.130 Horn concluded:
I do not know what the object is but the pictures convinced me that it is not an ancient artefact but of modern fabrication with machine-produced decorative strips and an underlying metal sheet.131
From fictions to fact
After working my way steadily through the archaeological records in Jerusalem I was unable to trace any further references to expeditions that had sought to test the Judaic traditions about the last resting place of the Ark of the Covenant. And the scholars whom I talked to confirmed that the field was indeed a limited one: Charles Warren, and later Meir Ben-Dov and his team, had dug in the vicinity of the Temple Mount (though they were not looking for the Ark); Montague Brownslow Parker – not an archaeologist but a ‘lunatic’, as Gabby Barkai had described him – had dug inside the Temple Mount but had not found anything; Antonia Frederick Futterer had found, but not explored, a secret passage on Mount Nebo which he had believed to contain the Ark; and lastly Tom Crotser claimed to have found the Ark itself in that same passage – which, however, seemed to have migrated from Mount Nebo to Mount Pisgah in the fifty years since Futterer’s visit.
And that was it. That, as the saying goes, was the boiling lot – with the sole exception of my own activities. And what was I doing? Well I was looking for the Ark, too, of course – a venture in which, I must confess, I was disconcerted to discover that I had been preceded only by Messianic visionaries and harebrained cranks.
My saving grace, I supposed, was that I had not the slightest interest in the building of the Third Temple and that I did not believe that the Ark had been buried beneath the Dome of the Rock or in Mounts Nebo or Pisgah. I realized that it would be practically impossible to prove that those locations concealed no further secrets; but I was now as satisfied as I ever would be that the lost relic had not gone to any of the places indicated in the Judaic traditions, that it had not been taken by the Egyptians or the Babylonians, and that it had not been destroyed either.
Its disappearance, therefore, looked more and more like a genuinely baffling mystery – ‘one of the great mysteries of the Bible’ as Richard Elliott Friedman, Professor of Hebrew and Comparative Religion at the University of California, had once described it.132 All my work in 1989 and 1990 had strengthened my conviction that the solution to that mystery must lie in Ethiopia. And yet … And yet … the one problem that I had not confronted at all, at any stage of my research, was that Ethiopia’s claim to possess the Ark seemed to rest on foundations that were every bit as flimsy as the Apocalypse of Baruch or the book of Maccabees.
To put matters plainly, I was beginning to feel that the Kebra Nagast’s bold assertions were not sufficiently reliable as a historical witness to justify a trip to the sacred city of Axum – a trip during which I would have to put my own life at risk. The insistence that the Queen of Sheba had been an Ethiopian and the linked pretence that she had borne a son to King Solomon who, in due course, had abducted the Ark from Jerusalem, had more the ring of preposterous fictions than of sober truths. To be sure, I had uncovered a great deal of evidence in Ethiopia – persuasive evidence – which did lend considerable support to the notion that the relic might really lie in the sanctuary chapel in Axum. And now I had satisfied myself that no other location could hope to present a more convincing case. That, however, was less a reflection of the strength of the Kebra Nagast’s account of how the Ark had got to Ethiopia than of the weakness of the alternatives.
Before finally committing myself to going to Axum, therefore, I felt that I needed to find a more convincing explanation than that offered in the Kebra Nagast of how ‘the most important object in the world in the Biblical view’133 could possibly have ended up in the heart of Africa. By the time that I finally left Jerusalem in mid-October 1990 I had found that explanation – as I shall recount in the next chapter.
Chapter 15
Hidden History
After a painstaking investigation, I had satisfied myself that Ethiopia’s claim to be the last resting place of the lost Ark was not challenged by any particularly strong or striking alternative. That finding, however, had not been the only outcome of my research. As I wrote in my notebook:
No one who has followed the story of the Ark from its construction at the foot of Mount Sinai until the moment of its deposition in Solomon’s Temple would seriously dispute that it was an object of immense importance to the Jewish people. And yet the fact is that the Scriptures – so dominated by the presence of the relic before Solomon – seem to forget about it entirely after him. Its loss is formally recognized at the time of the construction of the Second Temple. The great mystery, however, to quote the words of Professor Richard Friedman, is that: ‘There is no report that the Ark was carried away or destroyed … There is not even any comment such as “And then the Ark disappeared, and we do not know what happened to it,” or “And no one knows where it is to this day.” The most important object in the world, in the biblical view, simply ceases to be in the story.’1
Reviewing the evidence I had to ask myself: Why should this be? Why should the compilers of the Old Testament have allowed the Ark to vanish from the sacred texts – not with a bang, as one might have expected, but with a whimper?
The Kebra Nagast, I knew, did offer a clear answer to exactly this question. In Chapter 62 it described Solomon’s grief after he had discovered that his son Menelik had abducted the relic from the Temple and carried it off to Ethiopia. When he had had time to collect his thoughts, however, the king turned to the elders of Israel – who were likewise loudly lamenting the loss of the Ark – and warned them to desist:
Cease ye, so that the uncircumcised people may not boast themselves over us and may not say unto us, ‘Their glory is taken away, and God hath forsaken them.’ Reveal ye not anything else to alien folk …
And … the elders of Israel made answer and said unto him, ‘May thy good pleasure be done, and the good pleasure of the Lord God! As for us, none of us will transgress thy word, and we will not inform any other people that the Ark hath been taken away from us.’ And they established this covenant in the House of God – the elders of Israel with their King Solomon unto this day.2
In other words, if the Kebra Nagast was to believed, there had been a massive cover-up. The Ark had been removed to Ethiopia during the lifetime of Solomon himself; all information about this tragic loss had, however, been suppressed, which was why no mention was made of it in the Scriptures.
There was, I thought, much to recommend this argument. It made a great deal of sense to suppose that the Jewish king would indeed have sought to keep from the common herd any knowledge of the loss of the Ark. But at the same time I had serious problems with some other aspects of the Kebra Nagast account – notably those concerning the Queen of Sheba’s Ethiopian credentials, her alleged love affair with Solomon, the birth of their son Menelik, the notion that the latter had brought the Ark to Ethiopia, and the implication that this had happened in the tenth century BC:
1 There appeared to be no justification for the Kebra Nagast’s audacious claim that the Queen of Sheba had been an Ethiopian woman. It was not absolutely i
mpossible that she might have been (in his Antiquities of the Jews, for example, Flavius Josephus had described her as ‘the queen of Egypt and Ethiopia’3). On balance, however, historical research did not suggest that she had started her journey in the Abyssinian highlands when, as the Bible put it, she had travelled to ‘Jerusalem with a very great train, with camels that bare spices, and very much gold, and precious stones.’4
2 If the evidence linking the Queen of Sheba to Ethiopia was thin, then evidence for the very existence of her son Menelik was even thinner. I had known for some time that historians considered the supposed founder of Ethiopia’s ‘Solomonic’ dynasty to be a purely legendary figure – and I had learnt nothing in two years of research to persuade me that they were mistaken about this rather crucial point.
3 In particular it seemed to be inconceivable that an advanced culture and a centralized monarchy of the kind described in the Kebra Nagast could have existed in the Abyssinian mountains in the tenth century BC. ‘At the time when Solomon was reigning,’ as E. A. Wallis Budge had put it, ‘the natives of the country which we now call Abyssinia were savages.’5 This was the orthodox view and my research had uncovered nothing that would enable me to refute it.
4 Even more fatal to any kind of literal acceptance of the Kebra Nagas was the evidence that I myself had collected in Ethiopia. Of all the many traditions that I had encountered in that country, by far the purest and most convincing had indicated that the Ark of the Covenant had been brought first of all to Lake Tana, where it had been concealed on the island of Tana Kirkos. Memhir Fisseha, the priest whom I had interviewed there (see Chapter 9), had told me that the relic had remained on the island for eight hundred years before it had finally been taken to Axum at the time of Ethiopia’s conversion to Christianity. Since that conversion had occurred around AD 330, the implication of the strong folk memory preserved on Tana Kirkos was that the Ark must have arrived in Ethiopia in 470 BC or thereabouts – in other words about five hundred years after Solomon, Menelik and the Queen of Sheba.
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