Hi, > On the subject of the Ark being in Ethiopia, did you ever read that book > "The Sign and the Seal" by Graham Hancock? I thought it was quite nicely > written and researched until he started bringing out a whole raft of > Atlantis-was-here-type books soon afterwards. Of course then you have to > start worrying that he was just talking bollocks all along :-(
> And anyway, everyone knows that the Ark is hidden in a bloody big > government warehouse somewhere in the USA :-) Yes, I read it before my first trip there. Hancock is a strange character. He was a respectable journalist - with the Economist, I think - for a long time, but became too closely associated with, and something of an apologist for, the nasty Mengistu regime. This means a lot of Ethiopians have very mixed feelings about him. On the one hand, the book has been good for the image of the country; on the other, he was definitely on the wrong side during the Derg years. A lot of the stuff in the book is just the usual Ministry of Tourism claptrap that is in every book about Ethiopia. But some of it is very interesting. His description of the Timkat festival is very good, and very accurate. I went to the festival in Lalibela in 1998, and it was quite extraordinary. I haven't finished with Ethiopia yet. I hope to go back again more than once. I haven't read any of his other Atlantis-type stuff - it's obviously all complete rubbish designed to extract cash from the gullible. -- Cheers, Bob
