The Sign and the Seal. A quest for the Lost Ark of the Covenant

The upshot of such sustained and vindictive oppression was that it forever deprived Ethiopia's Jews of the autonomous statehood that they had obviously once enjoyed and thus hastened their slide into obscurity. Looking back through the admittedly sketchy historical documents at my disposal, I found that it was even possible to chart this gradual submergence and disappearance in numerical terms. In the early 1600s, for example, the Falashas were said to have numbered some '100,000 effective men'.(75) Assuming one 'effective man' per family of five, this would give a total population for that period of around 500,000. Nearly three hundred years later in the late nineteenth century the Jewish scholar Joseph Hal put total Falasha numbers at around 150,000.(76) By the end of the first quarter of the twentieth century this figure had plummeted to just 50,000 according to the undoubtedly well-informed estimate of another Jewish investigator, Jacques Faitlovich.(77) Sixty years on, in the famine year of 1984, the Falasha population of Ethiopia was reliably estimated at 28,000.(78) My reading left me in no doubt that the watershed had come at the beginning of the seventeenth century with the Susneyos campaigns, which had clearly broken the back of Falasha resistance. Before that they had been a populous and powerful folk with kings and a kingdom of their own; afterwards, disenfranchised and beaten, their numbers remorselessly declined. The historical record, therefore, more than adequately resolved the contradiction that had been bothering me, namely how to explain the latter-day victimization and impoverishment of the Falashas if it were true that Judaism had been brought to Ethiopia by so exalted a figure as Menelik I who had also brought the Holy Ark of the Covenant, the most precious and prestigious relic of the ancient world. I now realized that there was no contradiction at all. Indeed a scenario in which the Jewish religion had once enjoyed great influence suggested the only possible motive for the merciless pogroms, killings and mass enslavements that Susneyos and other Christian emperors had inflicted upon their Falasha compatriots. Simply stated, such bizarre and apparently psychopathic behaviour made a twisted kind of sense if the Christians had actively feared the possibility of a resurgence of Judaism and if their fear had stemmed from the fact that this rival monotheistic faith had earlier represented an extremely strong and enduring theme in Ethiopian life.

'CONSUMMATION OF HEART'S DESIRE . . .'

All this, I reasoned, strongly supported the view that Judaism had arrived in Ethiopia long before Christianity. By the same token it also added some social corroboration to the legendary account of Menelik's abduction of the Ark. To summarize, I now knew that:

The Falashas' archaic traditions of blood sacrifice as well as some of their other religious practices cast grave doubt on the academic orthodoxy which favoured a late (and South Arabian) origin for Ethiopian Judaism. On the contrary the evidence suggested quite compellingly that the Jewish faith must have come to Ethiopia in First Temple times and must then have been isolated there. Furthermore, the best possible account of how and why Judaism had taken root in the heart of Africa at so early a date was provided by the Kebra Nagast. Since the story of the abduction of the Ark was central to that account it followed that Ethiopia's claim to possess the sacred relic deserved to be taken seriously. There was clear evidence to suggest that the Jewish faith had been an important force in Ethiopia long before the arrival of Christianity in the fourth century AD. This evidence also suggested that Jews and Christians had subsequently engaged in a protracted struggle to the death. The winners of this struggle had been the Christians who had, in the process, captured the Ark of the Covenant. Thereafter they had gradually incorporated it into their own non-Jewish religious ceremonies. This was the only satisfactory explanation for what was otherwise an incomprehensible anomaly namely the crucial role, unique in the Christian world, played in all Ethiopian church services by replicas of an Old Testament relic. These replicas depicted the contents of the Ark i.e. the tablets of stone rather than the Ark itself. This had originally confused me; I now understood, however, that it was merely an example of a culture being 'economical with its symbols'. In the Holy of Holies of every one of the more than twenty thousand Orthodox churches in Ethiopia was a tabot. Behind these tabotat and directly responsible for the superstitious dread which they inspired in the general population lay a mysterious and puissant object. There now seemed to me to be every possibility that that object might indeed be the Holy Ark of the Covenant.

Of course there were still several loose ends. These included the important issue of the ethnic identity of the Queen of Sheba (could she really have been an Ethiopian?). Linked to this, and of at least equal weight, was another legitimate doubt that the scholars had raised: in the era of Solomon was it really possible that Ethiopia could have possessed a sufficiently 'high' civilization to have engaged in direct cultural contact with ancient Israel? Finally there was the problem of Axum to which Richard Pankhurst had drawn my attention in 1983.(79) The sacred city had not even existed in Solomon's time and therefore the Ark could not have been brought to it. This did not preclude the possibility that the relic might have been deposited at some other place in Ethiopia and then moved to Axum at a later date. If so, where was that 'other place' and why had I encountered no traditions concerning it? These, I realized, were questions for which I would eventually have to seek answers. There were others, too. Indeed it was perhaps intrinsic to the occult and recondite nature of the Ark of the Covenant that it would always generate questions, confusions, ambiguities and misgivings. An object so rare and precious, imbued with such power, venerated with such fervour over so many centuries and charged with the numinous energy of God could hardly be expected to yield up its secrets easily or to any casual inquirer. I felt, however, that the evidence I had already unearthed in support of Ethiopia's claim to be the last resting place of the relic was sufficiently thought-provoking to merit further research. Moreover, when I combined this evidence with the results of the decoding exercise that I had just carried out on Wolfram's Parzival, I found it difficult to resist the conclusion that two plus two did indeed equal four. In short, knowing what I knew now, it seemed to me hardly surprising that the clandestine tradition of quest that I had identified should have focussed on the Abyssinian highlands. After all, for a group of knights whose very identity was bound up with the mysteries of Solomon's Temple, no real historical relic other than the Ark could possibly have served as a more fitting object of chivalric endeavour. By the same token, there was only one country in which such an endeavour might have been undertaken with any genuine hope of success a country which had a living institution of Ark-worship, a Solomonic heritage, and a credible claim to possess the Ark itself. I therefore believed I was right in my hypothesis that the Templars had launched a quest in Ethiopia in the late twelfth century and I believed that they had found the precious relic which Wolfram had described as 'the consummation of heart's desire'.(80) As I shall recount in the next chapter, however, I also believed that they had lost it again that it had been wrested from them and that they had been obliged to quit Ethiopia without it. Why? Because a very few intrepid men continued to travel to Ethiopia in search of the Ark long after the utter destruction of the Knights of the Temple of Solomon in the fourteenth century. Furthermore, though they travelled at different periods, and were born in different lands, all these later adventurers were directly linked to the Templars and had inherited their traditions.

CHAPTER 7 A SECRET AND NEVER-ENDING QUEST

From the first to the sixth century AD the empire centred on the city of Axum in northern Ethiopia could rightly claim to rank amongst the most powerful and prosperous in the known world. It dealt on equal terms with Rome and Persia and sent its navies sailing to ports as far afield as Egypt, India, Ceylon and China. Its architectural and artistic achievements were impressive and it became the first bastion of Christianity in sub-Saharan Africa, adopting the new faith as its official religion in the early fourth century AD (coincidentally at much the same time as the miraculous conversion of Constantine the Great).(1) By the seventh century, however, Axum's light had begun to dim; the embassies that it sent abroad were now few and far between and its once formidable military power was clearly in decline. This marked change, which eventually led to total isolation, had much to do with the advance of the belligerent forces of Islam and the encirclement of Abyssinian Christianity during and after the lifetime of the Prophet Muhammad (AD 570 632). 'Encompassed by the enemies of their religion,' wrote Edward Gibbon in his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, 'the Ethiopians slept for near a thousand years, forgetful of the world by whom they were forgotten.'(2) The millennium to which the great English historian referred lasted from roughly the seventh to the sixteenth centuries, during which time it would be fair to say that Ethiopia all but disappeared from world consciousness. Formerly well known to outsiders, and relatively well travelled, this Christian country in the remote highlands of Africa was gradually transformed into a mysterious realm of myth and magic in which dragons and other monsters were believed to dwell a terra incognita where no one dared (or wanted) to venture. It would have been tempting to assume that the Abyssinians had reverted to barbarism or stagnated during the long, dark hole in their history. My researches had shown me, however, that the opposite was true: as the extraordinary rock-hewn churches of Lalibela proved, a rich and idiosyncratic culture had been preserved throughout. Moreover, although this culture was introverted and suspicious of the motives of foreign powers, it had stayed in contact with the outside world. Prince Lalibela himself had spent twenty-five years as an exile in Jerusalem in the second half of the twelfth century. And it had been from Jerusalem that he had returned to Ethiopia to claim his kingdom and to build the monolithic churches that now bear his name. As outlined in Chapter 5, my findings had convinced me of the possibility that Lalibela might have been accompanied by a contingent of Templars when he left the Holy Land in 1185 to win back his throne. These knights, I believed, would have been motivated first and foremost by a desire to seek out the Ark of the Covenant in Ethiopia. In furtherance of this end it seemed logical to suppose that they would have been more than willing to assist the prince to achieve his own political objectives since by so doing they might reasonably have expected to gain great influence. The reader will recall that I then learned of an Ethiopian tradition which told of the involvement of mysterious 'white men' in the construction of the Lalibela churches. This tradition was an ancient one. Indeed, it had already been very old when it had first been recorded in the early sixteenth century by a Portuguese visitor, Father Francisco Alvarez. I knew that the Templars had been great builders and architects,(3) and it was therefore difficult to resist the conclusion that they might have been the 'white men' who had had a hand in the creation of the rock-hewn monoliths. Furthermore, since the churches were twenty-four years in the making, the implication was that the knights had at the very least had a sustained presence in Ethiopia and perhaps had entertained plans for an even longer-term involvement in the affairs of that country. The suspicion that this might indeed have been the case deepened as my research continued. In order to explain why, it is first of all necessary to acquaint the reader with what happened to the Templars during and immediately after the brutal suppression of the order in the early fourteenth century. It is also necessary to cross-reference this information with certain events that took place in Ethiopia at around the same time.

A PERIOD INVOLVED IN DARKNESS

Founded in the year 1119, and given official recognition by the church in 1128 at the Synod of Troyes, the Templars quickly rose to a position of great international power, wealth and prestige a position from which they were nevertheless doomed to fall within two centuries. The history of the order's catastrophic collapse has been too frequently and thoroughly recounted elsewhere to require extensive repetition here.(4) Suffice it to say that quite suddenly, on Friday 13 October 1307, all Templars residing in France were arrested. This was a well co-ordinated operation that saw simultaneous dawn swoops on hundreds of Templar properties by the bailiffs and seneschals of the French king, Philip IV. By nightfall 15,000 men were in chains and Friday the 13th had won a unique place for itself in the popular imagination as the most unlucky and inauspicious date in the calendar. The charges levelled against the Templars to justify their dramatic and humiliating arrests were as lurid as they were imaginative. They were accused, for example, of denying Christ and spitting on His image, and of giving each other indecent kisses 'in shame of human dignity, according to the profane rite of the order' (these kisses were said to be placed on the anus, navel and mouth of each initiate at the time of his induction). It was also alleged that they engaged in a wide range of other homosexual practices (which were 'required without the possibility of refusal'), and last but not least that they made offerings to idols.(5) At this time (and until 1377) the official residence of the Papacy was the city of Avignon in Provence. The reasons for the abandonment of the Vatican need not be gone into here.(6) Obviously, however, the removal of the Holy See to a point so close to French territory gave King Philip great influence over the Pope (Clement V who had been crowned at Lyons in Philip's presence in 1305)(7). This influence was exercised to the detriment of the Templars, whose destruction Philip was determined to ensure not only in France but also in every other country in which they were established. To this end the French monarch put pressure on Clement V who in due course issued a bull (Pastorales praeeminentiae, dated 22 November 1307) which ordered the arrest of the Templars throughout the Christian world.(8) Proceedings followed as far afield as England, Spain, Germany, Italy and Cyprus and, in 1312, another bull from the puppet Pope officially suppressed the order. Meanwhile thousands of Templars had been subjected to the most horrific tortures and inquisitions. Many were subsequently burned at the stake including Grand Master Jacques de Molay and the Preceptor of Normandy, Geoffroi de Charnay.(9) It is not my intention here to go in any depth into the persecution, trial and destruction of the Templars. I only became interested in these matters because of the evidence I had unearthed which suggested a possible Templar quest for the Ark in Ethiopia in the late twelfth century. Having established that a group of knights could have accompanied Lalibela from Jerusalem in the year 1185 I naturally wondered what might have happened next and this curiosity led me to look for clues in the subsequent history of the Templar Order. That history, of course, was rather short: less than 130 years after Lalibela's accession to the throne of Ethiopia the Templars had been rounded up, tortured, and burnt at the stake. Their properties and money had been shared out amongst the ruling houses of Europe; their order had ceased to exist; and their good name had been tainted by charges of sodomy, blasphemy and idolatry. Nor, in the records of the last century of their existence, could I find a single shred of evidence to support the view of a sustained Templar quest in Ethiopia. After the early 1200s the trail simply went cold; from then until the arrests in 1307 the order seemed to have been concerned solely with its campaigns in the Near East and with the build-up of its own considerable power and wealth. Where else, I wondered, might I find the information I was looking for? Few attempts had been made to chronicle developments in Ethiopia in the period that now concerned me. I knew, however, that James Bruce had done his utmost to gather and record ancient traditions during his lengthy visit in the eighteenth century. I therefore turned to his Travels which I now kept constantly on my desk. Towards the end of Volume I, as I had hoped, I came across several pages devoted to the reign of King Lalibela. Unfortunately much of what the Scottish adventurer had written was irrelevant to my own investigation. There was, however, one particular detail that attracted my attention. Drawing on 'the histories and traditions . . . thought the most authentic' in Ethiopia,(10) Bruce reported that Lalibela had promoted a scheme to reduce the downstream flow of water into the Nile river system in order 'to famish Egypt'.(11) After 'an exact survey and calculation', it seemed this illustrious monarch of the Zagwe dynasty had ascertained:

that there ran on the summit, or highest part [of Ethiopia], several rivers which could be intercepted by mines, and their stream directed into the low country southward, instead of joining the Nile, augmenting it and running northward. By this he found he should be able so to disappoint its increase, that it never would rise to a height proper to fit Egypt for cultivation.(12)

Such a project, I could not help but think, would certainly have suited Templar ambitions which, by the end of Lalibela's reign (AD 1211), had begun to focus on the conquest of Egypt. Several extensive battles were fought at this time on the banks of the Nile, and the Templars spent more than a year besieging the Arab fortress at Damietta in the delta.(13) There could be no doubt, therefore, that a 'famished' and weakened Egypt would have been very much to their liking. In the event, however, the diversion of the rivers was never completed: 'Death, the ordinary enemy of all these stupendous undertakings, interposed here and put a stop to this enterprise of Lalibela.(14) Bruce then added a comment on the last two monarchs of the Zagwe dynasty:

To Lalibela succeeded Imrahana Christos, remarkable for nothing but being son of such a father as Lalibela, and father to such a son as Naakuto Laab; both of them distinguished for works very extraordinary, though very different in their kind. The first, that is those of the father, we have already hinted at, consisting in great mechanical undertakings The other was an operation of the mind, of still more difficult nature, a victory over ambition, the voluntary abdication of a crown.'(15)

I was already familiar with the historical details that followed. In 1270, Naakuto Laab the last of the Zagwes was persuaded to abdicate his throne in favour of a certain Yekuno Amlak, a monarch claiming Solomonic descent. This king, as the reader may recall, had been biding his time in the distant province of Shoa where the Solomonic line had been preserved by the descendants of the single royal prince who had escaped the uprising of the Jewish queen Gudit in the tenth century.(16) Bruce had little or nothing to say about Yekuno Amlak himself, or about his immediate successors, Yagba Zion (1285-94) and Wedem Ara'ad (who ruled until the year 1314). Indeed, it seemed that the normally fastidious research methods favoured by the Scottish traveller had failed to yield any solid information at all for the century that followed Lalibela's death in AD 1211: All this period is involved in darkness,' Bruce complained. 'We might guess, but since we are not able to do more, it answers no good purpose to do so much.(17) Similar darkness, as I already knew, also enshrouded the period before Lalibela's accession to the throne. I was therefore left with a host of unanswered questions. Of these by far the most important concerned the Ark of the Covenant: I needed to know what had happened to it during the roughly 300 years (from the tenth to the thirteenth century) in which the rule of the Solomonic dynasty had been interrupted. And I needed to know whether the Templars might have gained direct access to the sacred relic if, as I supposed, they had established themselves in Ethiopia during Lalibela's reign. Once again I telephoned the historian Belai Gedai in Addis Ababa to see if he could enlighten me with his knowledge of local traditions. 'In the tenth century', he told me, 'we Ethiopians say that the Ark was removed from Axum by the priests and the people in order to keep it safe from the ravages of Queen Gudit, and we say that it was brought to an island on Lake Zwai...' 'You mean in the Rift Valley south of Addis Ababa? Yes.' 'That was a hell of a long way for it to be moved.' 'Yes, but no lesser distance would have been safe. Gudit was Jewish, you know. She wanted to establish the Falasha religion all over the country and she wanted to destroy Christianity. She came to burn and rob the churches at Axum. So the priests carried off the Ark to prevent it from falling into her hands, and they brought it very far all the way to Zwai! where they were sure that it would be out of her reach.' 'Do you know how long it remained on the island?' 'Our traditions say that it was there for seventy years and that after that it was taken back to Axum.' I thanked Gedai for his help and rang off. What he had told me fitted more or less with the picture of Ethiopian medieval history that I had thus far managed to piece together. I knew that the throne of Ethiopia had been held by Gudit for some years after she had deposed the Solomonids. I also knew that she had eventually been succeeded by the first monarch of the Zagwe dynasty, himself probably a Jew. Later, however (and certainly well before Lalibela's time), the Zagwes had converted to Christianity. It therefore seemed quite possible that they might have permitted the safe return of the Ark to its customary resting place in Axum where, presumably, it would still have been when Lalibela came to power. Of obvious relevance to this argument was the eyewitness account of the Ark in Ethiopia given by the Armenian geographer Abu Salih in his Churches and Monasteries of Egypt and some Neighbouring Countries. From internal textual evidence (the translator and editor of this important work explained in his Introduction), it was clear that it had been written 'in the first years of the thirteenth century(18) in other words during the reign of Lalibela himself. And although Abu Salih at no point stated in which Ethiopian city he had seen the sacred relic, there was no good reason to suppose that this city had not been Axum. Moreover, as I re-read the relevant passage, I was struck by a few words that I had overlooked before. Describing the transportation of the Ark on certain ceremonial occasions, the geographer had noted that it was 'attended and carried' by bearers who were 'white and red in complexion, with red hair'.(19) With a shock of genuine excitement I realized that I was looking at a second piece of pure and early testimony suggesting the presence of mysterious white men in Ethiopia at the time of King Lalibela (particularly so since another authoritative translation of the same passage rendered 'red hair' as 'blond hair'(20). Alvarez had already alerted me to the old tradition that white men had built the wonderful rock-hewn churches a tradition that fitted well with what I knew about the advanced architectural skills possessed by the Templars. Now, as though to bear out my own evolving theory, here was Abu Salih addressing me across seven centuries with the electrifying news that men who were white and red in complexion, men with red or even blond hair men, in other words, who sounded very much like northern Europeans had been associated closely and directly with the Ark of the Covenant itself. The possibility that these men might have been Templars was a very seductive one, but it still left my investigation stranded in the early thirteenth century and it still left the key questions unanswered. If the northern Europeans seen by Abu Salih had indeed been Templars then had they just contented themselves with carrying the relic from time to time or had they perhaps tried to remove it from Ethiopia and take it back to Europe? Most Important of all if they had tried, had they succeeded? On all these points, I had to admit, I was effectively blocked by the absolute lack of historical information. Obsessively secretive Is the Templars had undoubtedly been(21) it did not really surprise me that their own documents and records yielded so little. Nor was there any comfort to be gained from Ethiopian annals: after examining a wide range of different sources, I was forced to accept that the century after the death of King Lalibela had indeed been a period 'involved in darkness', just as James Bruce had observed. Almost nothing was known about what had gone on in these years.

(Figure 36-47)