A huddle grows around the high priests,
A huddle grows around the high priests, with
one young priest bearing an ikon, or holy
picture, while others hold ornate gold and silver crosses.
Paul Raffaele
* People & Places
Keepers of the Lost Ark?
<http://www.smithsonianmag.com/people-places/ark-covenant-200712.html>http://www.smithsonianmag.com/people-places/ark-covenant-200712.html
Christians in Ethiopia have long claimed to have
the ark of the covenant. Our reporter investigated
By Paul Raffaele
Photographs by Paul Raffaele
Smithsonian magazine, December 2007
Photo Gallery
[]
Keepers of the Lost Ark?
Explore more photos from the story
<http://www.smithsonianmag.com/people-places/christmas_lalibela-200712.html>Christmas
in Lalibela
Paul Raffaele
50,000 pilgrims descend on Ethiopia's "new" Jerusalem
"They shall make an ark of acacia wood," God
commanded Moses in the Book of Exodus, after
delivering the Israelites from slavery in Egypt.
And so the Israelites built an ark, or chest,
gilding it inside and out. And into this chest
Moses placed stone tablets inscribed with the Ten
Commandments, as given to him on Mount Sinai.
Thus the ark “was worshipped by the Israelites as
the embodiment of God Himself,” writes Graham
Hancock in The Sign and the Seal. "Biblical and
other archaic sources speak of the Ark blazing
with fire and light...stopping rivers, blasting
whole armies." (Steven Spielberg's 1981 film
Raiders of the Lost Ark provides a
special-effects approximation.) According to the
First Book of Kings, King Solomon built the First
Temple in Jerusalem to house the ark. It was
venerated there during Solomon's reign (c. 970-930 B.C.) and beyond.
Then it vanished. Much of Jewish tradition holds
that it disappeared before or while the
Babylonians sacked the temple in Jerusalem in 586 B.C.
But through the centuries, Ethiopian Christians
have claimed that the ark rests in a chapel in
the small town of Aksum, in their country's
northern highlands. It arrived nearly 3,000 years
ago, they say, and has been guarded by a
succession of virgin monks who, once anointed,
are forbidden to set foot outside the chapel grounds until they die.
One of the first things that caught my eye in
Addis Ababa, the country's capital, was an
enormous concrete pillar topped by a giant red
starthe sort of monument to communism still
visible in Pyongyang. The North Koreans built
this one as a gift for the Derg, the Marxist
regime that ruled Ethiopia from 1974 to 1991 (the
country is now governed by an elected parliament
and prime minister). In a campaign that Derg
officials named the Red Terror, they slaughtered
their political enemiesestimates range from
several thousand to more than a million people.
The most prominent of their victims was Emperor
Haile Selassie, whose death, under circumstances
that remain contested, was announced in 1975.
He was the last emperor of Ethiopiaand, he
claimed, the 225th monarch, descended from
Menelik, the ruler believed responsible for
Ethiopia's possession of the ark of the covenant in the tenth century B.C.
The story is told in the Kebra Negast (Glory of
the Kings), Ethiopia's chronicle of its royal
line: the Queen of Sheba, one of its first
rulers, traveled to Jerusalem to partake of King
Solomon's wisdom; on her way home, she bore
Solomon's son, Menelik. Later Menelik went to
visit his father, and on his return journey was
accompanied by the firstborn sons of some
Israelite nobleswho, unbeknown to Menelik, stole
the ark and carried it with them to Ethiopia.
When Menelik learned of the theft, he reasoned
that since the ark's frightful powers hadn't
destroyed his retinue, it must be God's will that it remain with him.
Many historiansincluding Richard Pankhurst, a
British-born scholar who has lived in Ethiopia
for almost 50 yearsdate the Kebra Negast
manuscript to the 14th century A.D. It was
written, they say, to validate the claim by
Menelik's descendants that their right to rule
was God-given, based on an unbroken succession
from Solomon and the Queen of Sheba. But the
Ethiopian faithful say the chronicles were copied
from a fourth-century Coptic manuscript that was,
in turn, based on a far earlier account. This
lineage remained so important to them that it was
written into Selassie's two imperial constitutions, in 1931 and 1955.
Before leaving Addis Ababa for Aksum, I went to
the offices of His Holiness Abuna Paulos,
patriarch of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church, which
has some 40 million adherents worldwide, to ask
about Ethiopia's claim to have the ark of the
covenant. Paulos holds a PhD in theology from
Princeton University, and before he was installed
as patriarch, in 1992, he was a parish priest in
Manhattan. Gripping a golden staff, wearing a
golden icon depicting the Madonna cradling an
infant Jesus, and seated on what looked like a
golden throne, he oozed power and patronage.
"We've had 1,000 years of Judaism, followed by
2,000 years of Christianity, and that's why our
religion is rooted in the Old Testament," he told
me. "We follow the same dietary laws as Judaism,
as set out in Leviticus," meaning that his
followers keep kosher, even though they are
Christians. "Parents circumcise their baby boys
as a religious duty, we often give Old Testament
names to our boys and many villagers in the
countryside still hold Saturday sacred as the Sabbath."
Is this tradition linked to the church's claim to
hold the ark, which Ethiopians call Tabota Seyen,
or the Ark of Zion? "It's no claim, it's the
truth," Paulos answered. "Queen Sheba visited
King Solomon in Jerusalem three thousand years
ago, and the son she bore him, Menelik, at age 20
visited Jerusalem, from where he brought the ark
of the covenant back to Aksum. It's been in Ethiopia ever since."
I asked if the ark in Ethiopia resembles the one
described in the Bible: almost four feet long,
just over two feet high and wide, surmounted by
two winged cherubs facing each other across its
heavy lid, forming the "mercy seat," or footstool
for the throne of God. Paulos shrugged. "Can you
believe that even though I'm head of the
Ethiopian church, I'm still forbidden from seeing
it?" he said. "The guardian of the ark is the
only person on earth who has that peerless honor."
He also mentioned that the ark had not been held
continuously at Aksum since Menelik's time,
adding that some monks hid it for 400 years to
keep it out of invaders' hands. Their monastery
still stood, he said, on an island in Lake Tana.
It was about 200 miles northwest, on the way to Aksum.
Ethiopia is landlocked, but Lake Tana is an
inland sea: it covers 1,400 square miles and is
the source of the Blue Nile, which weaves its
muddy way 3,245 miles through Ethiopia, Sudan and
Egypt to the Mediterranean. At the outlet where
the water begins its journey, fishermen drop
lines from primitive papyrus boats like those the
Egyptians used in the pharaohs' days. I glimpsed
them through an eerie dawn mist as I boarded a
powerboat headed for Tana Kirkos, the island of the ark.
Slowly the boatman threaded his way through a
maze of tree-covered islands so dense that he
began to wonder aloud whether we were lost. When,
after two hours, we suddenly confronted a rock
wall about 30 yards high and more than 100 yards
long, he cried, "Tana Kirkos" with obvious relief.
A fish eagle circled and squawked as a barefoot
monk clad in a patched yellow robe scurried down
a pathway cut into the rock and peered into our
boat. "He's making sure there are no women aboard," my translator said.
The monk introduced himself as Abba, or Father,
Haile Mikael. "There are 125 monks on the island,
and many are novices," he said. "Women have been
banned for centuries because the sight of them
might fire the young monks' passions."
Another monk, Abba Gebre Maryam, joined us. He,
too, wore a patched yellow robe, plus a white
pillbox turban. A rough-hewn wooden cross hung
from his neck, and he carried a silver staff
topped by a cross. In response to my questioning,
he elaborated on what Abuna Paulos had told me:
"The ark came here from Aksum for safekeeping
from enemies well before Jesus was born because
our people followed the Jewish religion then," he
said. "But when King Ezana ruled in Aksum 1,600
years ago, he took the ark back to Aksum."
Ezana's kingdom extended across the Red Sea into
the Arabian peninsula; he converted to
Christianity around A.D. 330 and became hugely
influential in spreading the faith.
Then Abba Gebre added: "The baby Jesus and Mary
spent ten days here during their long exile from
Israel." It was after King Herod ordered the
death of all boys under the age of 2 in
Bethlehem, he said. "Would you like to see the place where they often sat?"
I followed him up a wooded path and onto a ridge
where a pair of young monks were standing by a
small shrine, their eyes closed in prayer. Abba
Gebre pointed to the shrine. "That's where Jesus
and Mary sat each day while they were here."
"What proof do you have that they came here?" I asked.
He looked at me with what appeared to be tender
sympathy and said: "We don't need proof because
it's a fact. The monks here have passed this down for centuries."
Later, Andrew Wearring, a religious scholar at
the University of Sydney, told me that "the
journey by Jesus, Mary and Joseph is mentioned in
only a few lines in the Book of Matthewand he
gives scant detail, though he does state they
fled into Egypt." Like its former parent
institution the Orthodox Coptic Church, the
Ethiopian Orthodox faith holds that the family
spent four years in western Egypt, Wearring said,
in the Nile Valley and the Nile Delta, before
returning home. But western Egypt is over 1,000
miles northwest of Lake Tana. Could Jesus, Mary
and Joseph have traveled to Tana Kirkos? There's no way to know.
On the way back to the boat, we passed small log
huts with conical thatched roofsthe monks'
cells. Abba Gebre entered one and pulled from the
shadows an ancient bronze tray set on a stand. He
said Menelik brought it from Jerusalem to Aksum along with the ark.
"The Jerusalem temple priests used this tray to
collect and stir the sacrificial animals' blood,"
Abba Gebre went on. When I checked later with
Pankhurst, the historian said the tray, which he
had seen on an earlier visit, was probably
associated with Judaic rituals in Ethiopia's
pre-Christian era. Lake Tana, he said, was a stronghold of Judaism.
Finally, Abba Gebre led me to an old church built
from wood and rock in the traditional Ethiopian
style, circular with a narrow walkway hugging the
outer wall. Inside was the mak'das, or holy of
holiesan inner sanctum shielded by brocade
curtains and open only to senior priests. "That's
where we keep our tabots," he said.
The tabots (pronounced "TA-bots") are replicas of
the tablets in the ark, and every church in
Ethiopia has a set, kept in its own holy of
holies. "It's the tabots that consecrate a
church, and without them it's as holy as a
donkey's stable," Abba Gebre said. Every January
19, on Timkat, or the Feast of the Epiphany, the
tabots from churches all over Ethiopia are paraded through the streets.
"The most sacred ceremony occurs at Gonder," he
went on, naming a city in the highlands just
north of Lake Tana. "To understand our deep
reverence for the ark, you should go there."
Gonder (pop. 160,000) spreads across a series of
hills and valleys more than 7,000 feet above sea
level. On the advice of a friendly cleric, I
sought out Archbishop Andreas, the local leader
of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church. As Andreas
ushered me into a simple room in his office, I
saw that he had the spindly frame and sunken
cheeks of an ascetic. Despite his high position,
he was dressed like a monk, in a worn yellow
robe, and he held a simple cross carved from wood.
I asked if he knew of any evidence that the ark
had come to Ethiopia with Menelik. "These stories
were handed down through the generations by our
church leaders, and we believe them to be
historical facts," he told me in a whisper.
"That's why we keep tabots in every church in Ethiopia."
At noon the next day, Andreas, in a black robe
and black turban, emerged from a church on a
slope above Gonder and into a crowd of several
hundred people. A dozen priests, deacons and
acolytesclad in brocade robes in maroon, ivory,
gold and bluejoined him to form a protective
huddle around a bearded priest wearing a scarlet
robe and a golden turban. On his head the priest
carried the tabots, wrapped in ebony velvet
embroidered in gold. Catching sight of the sacred
bundle, hundreds of women in the crowd began
ululatingmaking a singsong wail with their
tonguesas many Ethiopian women do at moments of intense emotion.
As the clerics began to walk down a rocky pathway
toward a piazza at the center of town (a legacy
of Italy's occupation of Ethiopia in the 1930s),
they were hemmed in by perhaps 1,000 more
chanting and ululating devotees. At the piazza,
the procession joined clerics carrying tabots
from seven other churches. Together they set off
farther downhill, with the trailing throng
swelling into the thousands, with thousands more
lining the road. About five miles later, the
priests stopped beside a pool of murky water in a park.
All afternoon and through the night, the priests
chanted hymns before the tabots, surrounded by
worshipers. Then, prompted by glimmers of light
sneaking into the morning sky, Archbishop Andreas
led the clerics to celebrate the baptism of Jesus
by playfully splashing one another with the pool's water.
The Timkat celebrations were to continue for
three more days with prayers and masses, after
which the tabots would be returned to the
churches where they were kept. I was more eager
than ever to locate the original ark, so I headed
for Aksum, about 200 miles northeast.
Just outside Gonder, my car passed Wolleka
village, where a mud-hut synagogue bore a Star of
David on the roofa relic of Jewish life in the
region that endured for as long as four
millennia, until the 1990s. That was when the
last of the Bet Israel Jews (also known as the
Falasha, the Amharic word for "stranger") were
evacuated to Israel in the face of persecution by the Derg.
The road degenerated into a rutted, rocky pathway
that twisted around the hillsides, and our SUV
struggled to exceed ten miles per hour. I reached
Aksum in darkness and shared the hotel dining
room with United Nations peacekeepers from
Uruguay and Jordan who told me they were
monitoring a stretch of the Ethiopia-Eritrea
border about an hour's drive away. The latest
U.N. bulletin, they said, described the area as "volatile and tense."
The next day was hot and dusty. Except for the
occasional camel and its driver, Aksum's streets
were nearly empty. We weren't far from the
Denakil Desert, which extends eastward into Eritrea and Djibouti.
By chance, in the lobby of my hotel I met Alem
Abbay, an Aksum native who was on vacation from
Frostburg State University in Maryland, where he
teaches African history. Abbay took me to a stone
tablet about eight feet high and covered in
inscriptions in three languagesGreek; Geez, the
ancient language of Ethiopia; and Sabaean, from
across the Red Sea in southern Yemen, the true
birthplace, some scholars believe, of the Queen of Sheba.
"King Ezana erected this stone tablet early in
the fourth century, while still a pagan ruler,"
Abbay told me. His finger traced the
strange-looking alphabets carved into the rock 16
centuries ago. "Here, the king praises the god of
war after a victory over a rebel people." But
sometime in the following decade Ezana was converted to Christianity.
Abbay led me to another stone tablet covered with
inscriptions in the same three languages. "By now
King Ezana is thanking 'the Lord of Heaven' for
success in a military expedition into nearby
Sudan," he said. "We know he meant Jesus because
archaeological digs have turned up coins during
Ezana's reign that feature the Cross of Christ
around this time." Before that, they bore the
pagan symbols of the sun and moon.
As we walked on, we passed a large reservoir, its
surface covered with green scum. "According to
tradition, it's Queen Sheba's bath," Abbay said.
"Some believe there's an ancient curse on its waters."
Ahead was a towering stele, or column, 79 feet
high and said to weigh 500 tons. Like other
fallen and standing steles nearby, it was carved
from a single slab of granite, perhaps as early
as the first or second century A.D. Legend has it
that the ark of the covenant's supreme power
sliced it out of the rock and set it into place.
On our way to the chapel where the ark is said to
be kept, we passed Sheba's bath again and saw
about 50 people in white shawls crouched near the
water. A boy had drowned there shortly before,
and his parents and other relatives were waiting
for the body to surface. "They say it will take
one to two days," Abbay said. "They know this
because many other boys have drowned here while
swimming. They believe the curse has struck again."
Abbay and I made our way toward the office of the
Neburq-ed, Aksum's high priest, who works out of
a tin shed at a seminary close by the ark chapel.
As the church administrator in Aksum, he would be
able to tell us more about the guardian of the ark.
"We've had the guardian tradition from the
beginning," the high priest told us. "He prays
constantly by the ark, day and night, burning
incense before it and paying tribute to God. Only
he can see it; all others are forbidden to lay
eyes on it or even go close to it." Over the
centuries, a few Western travelers have claimed
to have seen it; their descriptions are of
tablets like those described in the Book of
Exodus. But the Ethiopians say that is
inconceivablethe visitors must have been shown fakes.
I asked how the guardian is chosen. "By Aksum's
senior priests and the present guardian," he
said. I told him I'd heard that in the mid-20th
century a chosen guardian had run away,
terrified, and had to be hauled back to Aksum.
The Neburq-ed smiled, but did not answer.
Instead, he pointed to a grassy slope studded
with broken stone blocksthe remains of Zion
Maryam cathedral, Ethiopia's oldest church,
founded in the fourth century A.D. "It held the
ark, but Arab invaders destroyed it," he said,
adding that priests had hidden the ark from the invaders.
Now that I had come this far, I asked if we could
meet the guardian of the ark. The Neburq-ed said
no: "He is usually not accessible to ordinary people, just religious leaders."
The next day I tried again, led by a friendly
priest to the gate of the ark chapel, which is
about the size of a typical suburban house and
surrounded by a high iron fence. "Wait here," he
said, and he climbed the steps leading to the
chapel entrance, where he called out softly to the guardian.
A few minutes later he scurried back, smiling. A
few feet from where I stood, through the iron
bars, a monk who looked to be in his late 50s peered around the chapel wall.
"It's the guardian," the priest whispered.
He wore an olive-colored robe, dark pillbox
turban and sandals. He glanced warily at me with
deep-set eyes. Through the bars he held out a
wooden cross painted yellow, touching my forehead
with it in a blessing and pausing as I kissed the
top and bottom in the traditional way.
I asked his name.
"I'm the guardian of the ark," he said, with the
priest translating. "I have no other name."
I told him I had come from the other side of the
world to speak with him about the ark. "I can't
tell you anything about it," he said. "No king or
patriarch or bishop or ruler can ever see it,
only me. This has been our tradition since
Menelik brought the ark here more than 3,000 years ago."
We peered at each other for a few moments. I
asked a few more questions, but to each he
remained as silent as an apparition. Then he was gone.
"You're lucky, because he refuses most requests
to see him," the priest said. But I felt only a
little lucky. There was so much more I wanted to
know: Does the ark look the way it is described
in the Bible? Has the guardian ever seen a sign
of its power? Is he content to devote his life to
the ark, never able to leave the compound?
On my last night in Aksum, I walked down the
chapel road, now deserted, and sat for a long
time staring at the chapel, which shone like silver in the moonlight.
Was the guardian chanting ancient incantations
while bathing the chapel in the sanctifying reek
of incense? Was he on his knees before the ark?
Was he as alone as I felt? Was the ark really there?
Of course I had no way of answering any of these
questions. Had I tried to slip inside in the
darkness to sneak a look, I'm sure the guardian
would have raised the alarm. And I was also held
back by the fear that the ark would harm me if I
dared defile it with my presence.
In the final moments of my search, I could not
judge whether the ark of the covenant truly
rested inside this nondescript chapel. Perhaps
Menelik's traveling companions did take it and
spirit it home to Ethiopia. Perhaps its origins
here stem from a tale spun by Aksumite priests in
ancient times to awe their congregations and
consolidate their authority. But the reality of
the ark, like a vision in the moonlight, floated
just beyond my grasp, and so the millennia-old
mystery remained. As the devotion of the
worshipers at Timkat and the monks at Tana Kirkos
came back to me in the shimmering light, I
decided that simply being in the presence of this
eternal mystery was a fitting ending to my quest.
Paul Raffaele is a frequent contributor to
Smithsonian. His story on Congo's
<http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/guerilla.html>imperiled
mountain gorillas appeared in
<http://www.smithsonianmag.com/issue/October_2007.html>October.
Books
Ethiopia & Eritrea by Matt Phillips and
Jean-Bernard Carillet, Lonely Planet Publications (Oakland, California), 2006
Searching for the Ark of the Covenant by Randall
Price, Harvest House Publishers (Eugene, Oregon), 2005
The Sign and the Seal: The Quest for the Lost Ark
of the Covenant by Graham Hancock, Simon & Schuster, 1992
As reported on WND: http://wnd.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=102119
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