Keepers of the lost Ark
Christians in Ethiopia have long claimed to have the ark of the
covenant. Our reporter investigated
By Paul Raffaele
Smithsonian magazine, December 2007
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 star—the
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 enemies—
estimates 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 Ethiopia—and, 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 nobles—who, 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 historians—including Richard Pankhurst, a British-born scholar
who has lived in Ethiopia for almost 50 years—date 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 Matthew—and 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 roofs—the 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 holies—an
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 acolytes—clad in
brocade robes in maroon, ivory, gold and blue—joined 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 ululating—making a singsong
wail with their tongues—as 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 roof—a 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
languages—Greek; 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 inconceivable—the 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 blocks—the
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 imperiled mountain gorillas appeared in October.
Christians in Ethiopia have long claimed to have the ark of the
covenant. Our reporter investigated
By Paul Raffaele
Smithsonian magazine, December 2007
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 star—the
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 enemies—
estimates 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 Ethiopia—and, 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 nobles—who, 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 historians—including Richard Pankhurst, a British-born scholar
who has lived in Ethiopia for almost 50 years—date 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 Matthew—and 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 roofs—the 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 holies—an
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 acolytes—clad in
brocade robes in maroon, ivory, gold and blue—joined 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 ululating—making a singsong
wail with their tongues—as 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 roof—a 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
languages—Greek; 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 inconceivable—the 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 blocks—the
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 imperiled mountain gorillas appeared in October.
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