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

Our work began the moment that we arrived. Waiting to greet us as we stepped down from the plane was an elderly Abyssinian gentleman wearing a slightly threadbare three-piece suit and a most splendid patriarchal beard. In quaint but excellent English, he introduced himself as Berhane Meskel Zelelew and explained that he had been contacted by radio from Addis Ababa and ordered to guide us and act as our interpreter. He was employed, he said, by the Ministry of Culture 'to keep an eye on the antiquities of Axum'. In this capacity he had helped the archaeologists from the British Institute in Eastern Africa whose excavations of some of the city's most interesting ruins had been interrupted by the revolution of 1974.(14) 'It's so nice to see other British people here after such a long time,' he exclaimed as we introduced ourselves. We climbed into a vintage Land Rover with a lime-green paint job and two neat bullet holes in the front windscreen. 'Fortunately no one was killed,' Zelelew reassured us when we asked him about these. Laughing nervously as we drove away from the airfield, I then explained what we had come to do, listed the historic sites that we wanted to visit, and told him that I was particularly intrigued by Axum's claim to be the last resting place of the Ark of the Covenant. 'Do you believe that the Ark is here?' I asked. 'Yes. Certainly.' 'And where is it exactly?' 'It is deposited in a chapel near the centre of the city. Is this chapel very old?' 'No. Its construction was ordered by our late Emperor . . . in 1965 I think. Before that the relic had rested for many hundreds of years within the Holy of Holies of the nearby church of Saint Mary of Zion . . Zelelew paused, then added: 'Haile Selassie had a special interest in this matter, by the way . . . He was the two hundred and twenty-fifth direct-line descendant of Menelik, son of the Queen of Sheba and King Solomon. It was Menelik who brought the Ark of the Covenant to our country . . I was all for visiting the chapel at once, but Zelelew persuaded me that there was little point in hurrying: 'you will not be allowed anywhere near the Ark. Where it rests is holy ground. The monks and the citizens of Axum protect it and they would not hesitate to kill anyone who tried to break in. Just one man is allowed to enter and he is the monk responsible for guarding the Ark. We will try to meet him later today, but first let us go and see the Queen of Sheba's palace.' After we had assented to this attractive proposition we turned on to a bumpy, potholed road that had we been able to follow it all the way would eventually have led us hundreds of miles south-west, through the gigantic peaks and valleys of the Simien mountains, to the city of Gondar near Lake Tana. In open country barely a mile from the centre of Axum, however, we stopped within sight of an extensively fortified military post which, Zelelew explained, marked the limit of the government-controlled sector. He waved expressively at the nearby hills: 'Everything else TPLF, so we cannot go. It's a pity. There are so many interesting things to see . . . There, just around that corner in the road, are the granite quarries where all the stelae were cut. One still remains partially unexcavated from the rock. And there is a beautiful carving of a lioness. It is very ancient. It was put there before the coming of Christianity. But unfortunately we cannot reach it.' 'How far is it exactly?' I asked, tantalized. 'Very close, less than three kilometres. But the military will not let us past the checkpoint and if they did we would certainly be taken by the guerillas. Even here we should not stand around for too long. Your foreign faces will be noticed by the TPLF snipers. They might think you are Russians and decide to shoot at you . . .' He laughed: 'That would be highly undesirable, would it not? Come, follow me.' He led the way into fields to the north of the road and we quickly began to stumble across the remains of what must, once, have been an imposing building. 'This was the Queen of Sheba's palace,' Zelelew announced proudly. 'According to our traditions her name was Makeda and Axum was her capital. I know that foreigners do not accept that she was an Ethiopian at all. Nevertheless no other country has a stronger claim than ours.' I asked whether any archaeology had ever been done on the site to test the legends. 'Yes, in the late 1960s the Ethiopian Institute of Archaeology conducted some excavations here . . . I helped on the dig.' And what was discovered?' Zelelew made a mournful face. 'The opinion was that the palace was not sufficiently old to have been the residence of the Queen of Sheba.' What the archaeologists had unearthed, and what we now spent some time exploring, were the ruins of a great and well built edifice with finely mortared stone walls, deep foundations and an impressive drainage system. We saw a still-intact flagstone floor which Zelelew claimed was a large throne room and a number of stair-wells which hinted at the existence of at least one upper storey. There were also private bathing areas of sophisticated design and a well-preserved kitchen dominated by two brick ovens. Across the road, in a field facing the palace, we then inspected a number of rough-hewn granite stelae, some standing more than fifteen feet high, some fallen and broken. Most were undecorated but one, the largest, was carved with four horizontal bands, each band topped by a row of circles in relief like protruding beam ends in a building made of wood and stone. This crude obelisk, Zelelew told us, was thought by the townspeople to mark the grave of the Queen of Sheba. No excavation work had been carried out beneath it, however, and the field was now entirely given over to farmers who grew crops for the Axum garrison. Even as we talked we saw two peasant boys approach with an ox, which they harnessed to a wooden plough. Oblivious to the history that lay all around them, and apparently indifferent to our presence as well, they began to till the soil. After we had finished taking pictures and notes we drove back into the centre of the city and then out again to the north-east to another palace complex, this one on a hill-top with commanding views of the whole area. Square in plan, the structure measured about two hundred feet on each side. The walls, which had long since crumbled, showed signs of having originally been projected at the corners to form four towers possibly the very towers which, in the sixth century, the monk Cosmas had described as being adorned with brass unicorns. Beneath the fortress Zelelew then led us down steep stone stairways into a number of underground galleries and chambers which were roofed and walled with massive dressed granite blocks that fitted precisely against one another without any mortar in the joints. Local tradition, he said, identified this cool dark warren as the treasury used by Emperor Kaleb (AD 514 542) and also by his son Gebre-Maskal. With the aid of a flashlight we saw the empty stone coffers which lay within coffers believed to have once contained great riches in gold and pearls.(15) Further rooms, as yet unexcavated, extended into the hillside from there, blocked off behind thick granite walls. Eventually we left the hill-top fortress and made our way down into the centre of Axum on a gravel road. Near the bottom of the gradient, to our left, we paused to photograph a large, open deep-water reservoir dug down into the red granite of the hillside and approached by means of rough-hewn stairways. Known as the Mai Shum, it seemed to us very old an impression that Zelelew confirmed when he remarked that it was originally the Queen of Sheba's pleasure bath: 'At least so our people believe. Since the beginning of Christian times it has been used for baptismal ceremonies to celebrate the Holy Epiphany, which we call Timkat. And of course the peasants still come here every day to draw their water.' As though to confirm this last observation he pointed to a group of women carefully descending the time-worn steps bearing gourds on their heads. By now, without any of us really noticing how the time had passed, it was already well past the middle of the afternoon. Zelelew urged us to hurry, pointing out that we were scheduled to fly back to Asmara at first light the next day and that we still had much to see. Our next destination was close by, the so-called 'Park of the Stelae' certainly the focal point of Axum's archaeological interest. Here we examined and photographed a remarkable series of giant obelisks carved from slabs of solid granite. The most massive of these, a tumbled fractured ruin, was believed to have fallen to the ground more than a thousand years previously. In its heyday, though, it had stood one hundred and ten feet tall and must have dominated the entire area. I remembered from the reading I had done on the flight that its weight was estimated to exceed five hundred tons. It was thought to be the largest single piece of stone ever successfully quarried and erected in the ancient world. This fallen stele was painstakingly hewn to mimic a high, slender building of thirteen storeys each storey complete with elaborate representations of windows and other details, and demarcated from the next by a row of symbolic beam-ends. At the base could be discerned a false door complete with a knocker and lock, all perfectly carved in stone. Another fallen but much smaller and unbroken obelisk, Zelelew told us, had been stolen during the Italian occupation of 1935-41, transported with enormous difficulty to Rome by Mussolini, and re-erected near the Arch of Constantine. Since it, too, was elaborately carved and therefore of great artistic value the Ethiopian government was campaigning for its return. In the meantime, however, it was fortunate that a third decorated monolith still remained in situ in the stelae park. With a flourish our guide now pointed to this towering stone needle, more than seventy feet high and topped with a curved headpiece shaped like a half moon. We strolled over to examine it properly and found that, like its huge neighbour, it had been carved to resemble a conventional built-up structure in this case a nine-storey building in the fashion of a tower-house. Once again, the main decoration on the front elevation was provided by the semblance of windows and of beams of timber supposedly inserted horizontally into the walls. The intervals between each of the floors were defined by rows of symbolic log-ends, and the house-like appearance was further enhanced by the presence of a false door. Several other stelae of varying sizes were ranged around this refined monument all of them clearly the products of an advanced, well organized and prosperous culture. Nowhere else in sub-Saharan Africa had anything even remotely similar been built and, for this reason, Axum was a mystery its antecedents unknown, the sources of its inspiration unremembered.

THE SANCTUARY CHAPEL

Across the road, directly opposite the park of the stelae, stood a spacious walled compound containing two churches one old and the other obviously much more recent. These, Zelelew told us, were both dedicated to Saint Mary of Zion. The new one, which had a domed roof and a lofty bell-tower in the shape of an obelisk, had been built by Haile Selassie in the 1960s. The other dated back to the mid-seventeenth century and was the work of Emperor Fasilidas who, like so many Ethiopian monarchs before and since, had been crowned in Axum and had venerated the sacred city despite making his capital elsewhere. We found Haile Selassie's pretentious modern 'cathedral' as unpleasant as it was uninteresting. We were attracted, however, to the Fasilidas construction which, with its turrets and crenellated battlements, seemed to us 'half church of God, half castle' and thus to belong to a truly ancient Ethiopian tradition in which the distinctions between the military and the clergy were often blurred. In the dimly lit interior I was able to study several striking murals including one depicting the story of the life of Mary, another that of the Crucifixion and Resurrection of Christ, and a third the legend of Saint Yared the supposed inventor of Ethiopia's eerie church music. Faded with age, this latter work showed Yared performing before King Gebre-Maskal. The saint's foot had been pierced by a spear dropped from the monarch's hand but both men were so entranced by the music of sistrum and drum that they had not noticed. Not far from the old church were the ruins of a building that must once have been very extensive but was now reduced to little more than its deeply entrenched foundations. These, Zelelew explained, were the remains of the original Saint Mary of Zion which had been built in the fourth century AD at the time of the conversion of the Axumite kingdom to Christianity. Some twelve hundred years later, in 1535, it had been razed to the ground by a fanatical Muslim invader, Ahmed Gragn ('the left-handed'), whose forces swept across the Horn of Africa from Harar in the east and, at one time, threatened the complete extinction of Ethiopian Christendom. Shortly before its destruction, this 'first Saint Mary's' as Zelelew called it was visited by an itinerant Portuguese friar named Francisco Alvarez. I later looked up his description of it the only one that survives:

It is very large and has five naves of a good width and of a great length, vaulted above, and all the vaults are covered up, and the ceiling and sides are all painted; it also has a choir after our fashion . . . This noble church has a very large circuit, paved with flagstones, like gravestones, and it has a large enclosure, and is surrounded by another large enclosure like the wall of a large town or city.(16)

Zelelew rightly dated the start of construction works on the first Saint Mary's at AD 372(17) which meant that this was quite possibly the earliest Christian church in sub-Saharan Africa. A great five-aisled basilica, it was regarded from its inauguration as the most sacred place in all Ethiopia. This was so because it was built to house the Ark of the Covenant which, if there was any truth to the legends, must have arrived in the country long before the birth of Jesus and must then have been co-opted by the Christian hierarchy at some point after the new religion had been officially adopted by the Axumite state. When Alvarez visited Saint Mary's in the 1520s becoming, in the process, the first European to document the Ethiopian version of the legend of the Queen of Sheba and the birth of her only son Menelik(18) the Ark was still in the Holy of Holies of the ancient church. It did not stay there for very much longer, however. In the early 1530s, with the invading armies of Ahmed Gragn drawing ever closer, the sacred relic was removed 'to some other place of safekeeping' (Zelelew did not know where). It thus escaped the destruction and looting that the Muslims unleashed upon Axum in 1535. A hundred years later, with peace restored throughout the empire, the Ark was brought back in triumph and installed in the second Saint Mary's built by Fasilidas beside the razed remains of the first. And there apparently it stayed until 1965 when Haile Selassie had it moved to the new and more secure chapel put up at the same time as his own grandiose cathedral but annexed to the seventeenth-century church. It was in the grounds of Haile Selassie's chapel that the guardian monk told me his astonishing story about the Ark and warned me that it was 'powerful'. 'How powerful?' I asked. 'What do you mean?' The guardian's posture stiffened and he seemed suddenly to grow more alert. There was a pause. Then he chuckled and put a question to me: 'Have you seen the stelae?' 'Yes', I replied, 'I have seen them.' 'How do you think they were raised up?' I confessed that I did not know. 'The Ark was used,' whispered the monk darkly, 'the Ark and the celestial fire. Men alone could never have done such a thing.' On my return to the Ethiopian capital Addis Ababa, I took the opportunity to conduct some research into the historical merits of the legend that the guardian had related to me. I wanted to find out whether there was any possibility at all that the Queen of Sheba could have been an Ethiopian monarch. And if there was, then could she really have journeyed to Israel in the time of Solomon around three thousand years ago? Could she have been impregnated by the Jewish king? Could she have borne him a son named Menelik? Most importantly, could that son have made his way to Jerusalem as a young man, spent a year there at his father's court, and then returned to Axum with the Ark of the Covenant?

Chapter 2 DISENCHANTMENT

Questions of the kind that I needed to ask in order to evaluate Axum's claim to be the last resting place of the Ark of the Covenant were not entirely welcome in Addis Ababa in 1983. There was still a certain amount of revolutionary jingoism in the air less than nine years after Haile Selassie had been overthrown (and less than eight after he had been smothered with a pillow by the man who had engineered his downfall Lieutenant-Colonel Mengistu Haile Mariam). Mistrust, hatred and rank fear could also be detected everywhere: people remembered bitterly the period in the late 1970s when Mengistu's forces had unleashed the 'Red Terror' against those seeking to restore the monarchy. State-sponsored death squads had roamed the streets rooting out suspects from their homes and executing them on the spot. The families of the victims of these purges had then had to reimburse the cost of the bullets used to kill their relatives before they were allowed to claim back the bodies for burial. It was in the emotional climate fostered by such atrocities that I was obliged to conduct my preliminary research into a subject that had explicit connections with Ethiopia's last emperor and with the Solomonic dynasty to which he had belonged. Just how close these connections in fact were was made clear to me when a friend passed me a samizdat copy of a document prepared at the peak of Haile Selassie's power and popularity the 1955 Revised Constitution. Implemented with the intent of encouraging 'the modern Ethiopian to accustom himself to take part in the direction of all departments of State' and 'to share in the mighty task which Ethiopian Sovereigns have had to accomplish alone in the past', this remarkable piece of legislation nevertheless contained the following unequivocal confirmation of the age-old monarchy's Divine Right to rule:

The Imperial dignity shall remain perpetually attached to the line of Haile Selassie I, whose line descends without interruption from the dynasty of Menelik I, son of the Queen of Ethiopia, the Queen of Sheba, and King Solomon of Jerusalem ... By virtue of His Imperial Blood, as well as by the anointing which He has received, the person of the Emperor is sacred, His Dignity inviolable and His Power indisputable.(1)

I quickly established that Zelelew, our guide in Axum, had been correct about at least one of the things that he had told us: the Emperor had claimed to be the two hundred and twenty-fifth direct-line descendant of Menelik. Furthermore, very few of the Ethiopians to whom I talked in Addis Ababa even the most revolutionary amongst them seriously doubted the sacral pedigree of the Solomonic dynasty. Indeed, it was whispered that President Mengistu himself had plucked the ring of Solomon from Haile Selassie's dead hand and now wore it on his own middle finger as though, by this device, he could appropriate some of the charisma and supposed magical powers of his predecessor. Such whispers and rumours were interesting enough. They did not, however, satisfy my desire for hard information about the Ark of the Covenant and about its mystical associations with the deposed 'line of Haile Selassie I'. The problem was that most of my Ethiopian contacts were too terrified to tell me what they knew and shut up like clams whenever I mentioned the Ark, the former emperor, or indeed anything to do with the prerevolutionary period that might possibly be interpreted as seditious. I therefore only managed to make progress when a knowledgeable colleague arrived in Addis Ababa from England Professor Richard Pankhurst, whom I had invited to join me as co-author in the book that I was preparing for the government. Grandson of the famous English suffragette Emmeline Pankhurst, and the son of Sylvia Pankhurst who had fought heroically alongside the Abyssinian resistance during the Italian occupation in the 1930s Richard was, and remains, the leading historian of Ethiopia. In the time of Emperor Haile Selassie he had founded the scholarly and well respected Institute of Ethiopian Studies at Addis Ababa University. Shortly after the revolution in 1974 he had left the country with his family, but was now anxious to get reinvolved; our book project, therefore, suited his own requirements well and he had taken a few days off from his work at the Royal Asiatic Society in London in order to discuss our collaboration on the text. A tall but rather stooped man in his late fifties, he had a diffident, almost apologetic manner which as I had discovered some time previously disguised great self-confidence and a wicked sense of humour. His knowledge of Ethiopian history was comprehensive and one of the first matters I discussed with him was the Ark of the Covenant and the seemingly far-fetched claim that it might now rest in Axum. Did he think there could be any factual basis at all to this tradition? He replied that the story of Solomon and Sheba that I had heard in the sacred city had an ancient pedigree in Ethiopia. There were many versions of it, both oral and written. Amongst the latter the oldest still surviving was contained in a thirteenth-century manuscript known as the Kebra Nagast which was greatly revered and which most Ethiopians believed to tell 'the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth'. As a historian, however, he could not accept this particularly since the homeland of the Queen of Sheba had almost certainly been located in Arabia and not in Ethiopia at all. Nevertheless he could not entirely dismiss the possibility that the legend might contain 'some scintilla of veracity'. There had been well documented contacts between Ethiopia and Jerusalem in antiquity (though not as far back as the time of Solomon) and there could be no doubt that Ethiopian culture did contain a strong 'flavour' of Judaism. This was best illustrated by the presence in the country of a group of indigenous Jews known as the Falashas who lived in the Simien mountains to the south of Axum and around the shores of Lake Tana. There were also certain widespread customs (many of which Abyssinian Christians shared with their Falasha neighbours) which provided at least circumstantial evidence of early ties with Judaic civilization. These customs included circumcision, the following of food proscriptions very close to those outlined in the book of Leviticus, and the practice (still adhered to in isolated rural communities) of celebrating the Sabbath on Saturdays rather than on Sundays. I was already aware of the existence of the Falashas and had requested (but not yet been granted) official permission to visit and photograph at least one of their villages on our next field trip which would take us to Lake Tana and thence northwards to the city of Gondar and hopefully also to the Simien mountains. I knew next to nothing about the so-called 'Black Jews of Ethiopia', however, and asked Richard to tell me more about them. He replied that in physical appearance and in dress they were quite indistinguishable from other Abyssinian highlanders. Their mother tongue, too, was indigenous, being a dialect of the Agaw language which although now rapidly being replaced by Amharic, the national lingua franca had once been spoken extensively in the northern provinces. In short, the only really unique quality that the Falashas possessed was their religion which was undoubtedly Jewish, though of a very archaic and idiosyncratic kind. Their adherence to ancient customs, long abandoned elsewhere, had led a number of romantic and excitable visitors to proclaim them as 'the lost tribe of Israel'. And in the last decade this notion had received the official blessing of the Ashkenazi and Sephardi Chief Rabbis in Jerusalem who had defined the Falashas unequivocally as Jews a status that rendered them eligible for Israeli citizenship under the terms of the Law of Return. But, I asked, where had the Falashas come from in the first place? And how exactly had they been marooned in the middle of Ethiopia nearly two thousand miles from Israel? Richard admitted that there were no easy answers to these questions. The view accepted by most scholars was that a number of Jews had migrated to the Abyssinian mainland from south-western Arabia in the first and second centuries AD and had subsequently converted some sections of the local population to their faith; the Falashas were therefore seen as the descendants of these converts. It was true, he added, that an important Jewish community had established itself in the Yemen following persecution by the Roman occupiers of Palestine in the first century AD so it was theoretically possible that missionaries and traders had crossed the narrow Red Sea straits of Bab-el-Mandeb and entered Ethiopia. Nevertheless he knew of no historical evidence which confirmed that this was really what had happened. And what did the Falashas themselves say? Richard smiled: 'That they are descended from King Solomon of course . . . Their legend is basically the same as the Christian one but a bit more elaborate. If I remember correctly, they claim that Solomon not only made the Queen of Sheba pregnant but also her maidservant thus fathering not only Menelik but also a half-brother who founded a dynasty of Falasha kings. All the rest of the Jews in Ethiopia today are supposed to be the descendants of the bodyguard made up of the first-born sons of the elders of Israel who accompanied Menelik with the Ark of the Covenant.' 'And do you think there's any possibility that what they say might be true I mean that the Ark could really have been stolen from Solomon's Temple in Jerusalem and brought to Axum?' Richard made a wry face: 'Frankly no. No possibility at all. As a matter of fact Axum didn't even exist in the period when this is supposed to have happened. It simply wasn't there . . . Look, Solomon died I don't know exactly when but it must have been around the 940s or 930s BC. If Menelik was his son then it would have had to have been around those dates maybe even ten or fifteen years earlier that he brought the Ark to Axum. But there's absolutely no way that he could have done that. You see, Axum wasn't founded until at least the third century BC, perhaps not even until the second century BC in other words about seven or eight hundred years after the supposed theft of the Ark.' 'Well,' I said, 'that rather puts paid to the whole story doesn't it?' 'Yes although I expect it's just feasible that the Ark could have been brought to some other place in Ethiopia which later got mixed up with Axum in the traditions that have been handed down. There are, however, many other fallacies, anachronisms and inaccuracies in the legend which is why no historian or archaeologist worth his salt has ever been prepared to spend time investigating it . . . Nevertheless not all the things that the Falashas say about themselves are complete fantasies and some aspects of their origins would merit further research.' 'What, for example?' The claim I mentioned that there was once a dynasty of Jewish kings in Ethiopia ... If we go back to say the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries AD we find quite a lot of evidence to support that view and it's probable that they had a monarchic system long before then as well. In fact, by all accounts, the Jews were once a force to be reckoned with in this country: sometimes they even fought successful wars with the Christian rulers in order to preserve their independence. But over the years they gradually weakened and began to disappear. We know that their numbers were greatly reduced between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries. And unfortunately they've continued to be in steady decline ever since. There are probably no more than twenty thousand of them left now and most of them are trying to get to Israel.' Richard and I worked together in Addis for the next three days during which time I benefited enormously from the detailed briefings that he gave me about Ethiopian culture and history. Then he returned to London and Carol, Duncan and I embarked on the field trip that would take us to Lake Tana, Gondar and the Simiens.

TABOTS: REPLICAS OF THE ARK