The Sign and the Seal

by Graham Hancock

  The priests’ strange statement about the ‘white men’ who had come to Lalibela therefore struck me as being a matter of the utmost importance. Above all else, it strengthened my conviction that Wolfram had been indulging in something more than mere whimsy when, in Parsival, he had linked the Templars so closely to his Grail cryptogram and to Ethiopia. He had never, anyway, been a whimsical writer; on the contrary he had been pragmatic, clever and highly focussed. I thus now felt increasingly confident that my suspicions about him were justified and that he had indeed been admitted to the inner circles of a great and terrible mystery – the secret of the last resting place of the Ark of the Covenant. Perhaps through the good offices of his ‘source’, the Templar acolyte Guyot de Provins, or perhaps by means of a more direct contact, he had been commissioned by the order to encrypt that secret in a compelling story that would go on being told and retold for centuries.

  Why should the Templars have wanted Wolfram to do such a thing? I could think of at least one possible answer. Written down and placed in some form of container (a chest buried in the ground for example), the secret of the Ark’s whereabouts might easily have been lost or forgotten within a century or so, and would then only have come to light if somebody physically dug it up again. Cleverly encoded in a popular vehicle such as Parzival, however (which, I discovered, had been translated into almost all modern languages and reprinted in English five times in the 1980s in the Penguin Classics edition alone), the same secret would have stood an excellent chance of being preserved indefinitely in world culture. In this way, through all the passing centuries, it would have continued to be available to those with the capacity to decipher Wolfram’s code. It would, in short, have been hidden in full view, enjoyed by all as a ‘cracking good yarn’, but accessible only to a few – initiates, insiders, determined seekers – as the treasure map that it really was.

  This photograph of the ceiling of the rock-hewn church of Saint Mary’s was provided to me by my Canadian publisher John Pearce in November 1991 – shortly before this book went to press. Pearce took it on a visit that he made to Lalibela in 1982. On the arch can be seen a stylised croix pattée contained within a Star of David – a most unusual symbol in a Christian place of worship, but one to which it is known that the Knights Templar were particularly attached. Behind the arch can be seen a section of the cloth-wrapped column said by the priests to have been engraved by King Lalibela himself with the secrets of how the rock-hewn churches were made.

  16 In medieval times the Virgin Mary was repeatedly compared to both the Ark of the Covenant and the Holy Grail. This church steeple reflects these ideas by depicting Mary standing above the Ark.

  17 and 18 Amongst many other shared characteristics, the Holy Grail (illustrated above) and the Ark of the Convenant (on the horizon below) were both said to have given off a bright supernatural radiance.

  19 In this illustration from a rare 14th century manuscript, the German poet Wolfram von Eschenbach is depicted second from the left amongst a group of other minstrels. In his Parsival, Wolfram described the Holy Grail not as a cup or container but as a stone.

  20 Saint Bernard of Clairvaux, the force behind the formation of the Knights Templar in the twelfth century, is shown here urging the Second Crusade.

  21 A Knight Templar showing the croix-pattée that characterised the Order.

  22 The great Muslim mosque known as the Dome of the Rock was built in the seventh century AD and stands at the site originally occupied by Solomon’s Temple on Jerusalem’s Temple Mount.

  23 Interior of the Dome of the Rock showing the Shetiyya, the ‘foundation stone of the world’, which formed the floor of the Holy of Holies of Solomon’s Temple. It was here that Solomon placed the Ark 3,000 years ago and it was from here, at some unknown date, that the sacred relic vanished.

  24 and 25. Above: Porch of the Al Aqsa Mosque on Jerusalem’s Temple Mount 100 metres to the south of the Dome of the Rock. The porch, in Gothic style with three central bays, was built by the Knights Templar in the twelfth century when they used the Al Aqsa Mosque as their palace. Below: for comparison, the Gothic north porch of Chartres Cathedral.

  26 Interior of the circular Temple Church in London, with effigies of knights on the floor in the foreground. An early example of Gothic architecture, the church was built by the Templars in the 12th century.

  27 Frontispiece of Alvarez’ text, written in the 1520’s, describing the first official Portuguese mission to the court of Prester John in Ethiopia.

  28 The rock-hewn monolithic church of Saint Mary in the ancient Ethiopian settlement of Lalibela. Dating to the late 12th century, the church was ‘built by white men’ according to a local tradition recorded by Alvarez on his visit in the 1520’s. Could these white men have been Templars?

  29 Twelfth century rock-hewn church of Saint George at Lalibela. The double-cross device on its roof is a variant of the Templar cross and was later adopted by their successors – the Portuguese Knights of Christ.

  30 Grand Master of the Templars being burnt at the stake in the early 14th century. The suppression of the Templars began in 1307 and was instigated by Pope Clement V and King Philip IV of France. Less than a year earlier the first-ever Ethiopian mission to Europe had held an audience – in France – with Pope Clement V.

  31 Top left: Pope Clement V. 32 Top centre: Robert the Bruce, who gave shelter to fugitive Templars in Scotland. 33 Top right: Prince Henry the Navigator (1394–1460), Grand Master of the Knights of Christ, who inherited Templar traditions and who showed an exceptional interest in Ethiopia.

  34 Vasco da Gama, a member of the Knights of Christ, whose son Don Christopher da Gama was killed in Ethiopia in 1542.

  35 James Bruce of Kinnaird, who claimed to be descended from Robert the Bruce and whose epic journey to Ethiopia in the late eighteenth century shows evidence of a hidden agenda concerning the Ark of the Covenant. Though he kept it secret during his lifetime, Bruce was a Freemason and an inheritor of Templar traditions in Scotland.

  Chapter 6

  Resolving Doubts

  My visit to Chartres cathedral and my readings of Wolfram’s Parzival during the spring and summer of 1989 had opened my eyes to many things that I had missed before – notably to the revolutionary possibility that the Knights Templar could have made an expedition to Ethiopia in the twelfth century in search of the lost Ark. As explained in Chapter 5, I did not find it difficult to see how and why they might have been motivated to do that. But what I now needed to establish was this: other than the Templar ‘quest’ that I thought I had identified, was there really any convincing evidence to suggest that the last resting place of the Ark of the Covenant might actually be in the sanctuary chapel at Axum?

  After all, there were literally hundreds of cities and churches around the world which boasted of possessing holy relics of one kind or another – fragments of the True Cross, Christ’s shroud, the finger-bone of Saint Sebastian, the lance of Longinus, and so on and so forth. In almost every case where a proper investigation had been conducted such boasts had turned out to be hollow. Why, therefore, should Axum be any different? The fact that its citizens obviously believed their own legends certainly didn’t prove anything – except, perhaps, that they were a susceptible and superstitious lot.

  And, on the face of things, there seemed to be several good reasons for concluding that the Ethiopians did not possess the Ark of the Covenant.

  Trouble with tabots

  First and foremost, in the mid-nineteenth century, a legate of the Armenian Patriarch had visited Axum determined to prove that the tradition of the Ark’s presence there, ‘which the whole of Abyssinia believed to be the truth’, was in fact ‘an appalling lie’.1 After putting some pressure on the Axumite priests, the legate – whose name was Dimotheos – had been shown a slab of ‘reddish-coloured marble, twenty-four centimetres long, twenty-two centimetres wide and only three centimetres thick’2 which the priests had said was one of the two tablets of stone contained wi
thin the Ark. They had not shown him the object believed by Ethiopians to be the Ark itself and had clearly hoped that he would be satisfied with a glimpse of the tablet – which they had referred to as ‘the Tabot of Moses’.3

  Dimotheos had indeed been satisfied. He reported with the obvious pleasure of a man who has just debunked a great myth:

  The stone was virtually intact, and showed no sign of age. At the most it dated from the thirteenth or fourteenth century of the present era … Stupid people like the Abyssinians who blindly accept this stone as the original are basking in a useless glory by possessing it, [for it is] not the true original at all. Those that know the Holy Scriptures do not require any further proof of this: the fact is that the tablets on which the divine laws were inscribed were placed inside the Ark of the Covenant and lost forever.4

  What was I to make of this? If the slab of stone shown to the Armenian legate had really come from the relic claimed by the Axumites to be the Ark of the Covenant then he was right to suggest that they were basking in useless glory, because it went without saying that something made in ‘the thirteenth or fourteenth century of the present era’ could not possibly have been one of the two ‘tablets of the law’ on which the Ten Commandments had supposedly been inscribed more than twelve hundred years before the birth of Christ. In other words, if the contents were bogus then it followed that the container must be bogus too, which meant that the entire Axumite tradition was indeed ‘an appalling lie’.

  But that was a conclusion, I felt, that it would be premature to accept before attempting to find the answer to an important question: had Dimotheos been shown the object believed to be the genuine Tabot of Moses, or had he in fact been shown something else?

  This question was particularly pertinent because the Armenian legate had so obviously been affronted and outraged by the possibility that a people as ‘stupid’ as the Ethiopians might possess a relic as precious as the Ark of the Covenant – and had therefore very much wanted to prove that they did not. Moreover, as I read and re-read his account, it became apparent to me that his desire to vindicate his own prejudices had over-ridden any proper investigative spirit on his part – and that he had also absolutely failed to recognize the subtle and devious nature of the Ethiopian character.

  When he had visited Axum in the 1860s the specially dedicated sanctuary chapel had not yet been built5 and the Ark – or the object believed to be the Ark – was still kept in the Holy of Holies of the church of Saint Mary of Zion (where, in the seventeenth century, it had been installed by Emperor Fasilidas after the reconstruction of that great edifice6). Dimotheos, however, had not been permitted to enter the Holy of Holies. Instead he had been taken to a rickety wooden outbuilding ‘situated with some other rooms outside the church on the left’.7 It had been in this outbuilding that the ‘reddish-coloured marble stone’ had been revealed to him.8

  Because of this it seemed to me that there was a very high degree of probability that the Armenian legate had been duped by the priests. The Ark, I knew, was regarded as uniquely sacred by the Ethiopian Orthodox Church. It was therefore inconceivable that it, or any part of its contents, would have been removed even temporarily from the Holy of Holies of Saint Mary of Zion unless there had been some extremely compelling reason. The voyeuristic whim of a vulgar foreigner would certainly not have qualified as such a reason. At the same time, however, this foreigner had been an emissary of the Armenian Patriarch in Jerusalem and it would therefore have been thought wise to treat him with a certain amount of respect. What to do? The answer, I suspected, was that the priests had decided to show him one of the many tabots kept at Axum. And because he had so forcefully expressed his wish to see something connected to the Ark, if not the Ark itself, it would only have been kindly and polite to massage his ears with words that he obviously very much wanted to hear, namely that what he was being shown was the ‘original Tabot of Moses’.

  Needing to be sure that I was right about this I made a long-distance telephone call to Addis Ababa, where Professor Richard Pankhurst – my co-author on the government book in 1983 – was now living (he had moved back to the city in 1987 to take up his old post at the Institute of Ethiopian Studies). After telling him a little about my re-awakened interest in the Axumite tradition concerning the Ark of the Covenant, I asked him about the Dimotheos incident. Did he think that the Tabot that the Armenian legate had been shown could actually have been one of the objects believed by Ethiopians to have been placed in the Ark by Moses?

  ‘Most unlikely,’ Richard replied. ‘They wouldn’t show such a sacred thing to any outsider. Besides, I’ve read Dimotheos’s book and it’s full of mistakes and misapprehensions. He was a pompous man, pretty unscrupulous in his dealings with the Ethiopian Orthodox Church, and not entirely honest. I imagine the Axum clergy would have seen through him very quickly and fobbed him off with some other tabot that wasn’t of any great importance to them.’

  We talked for some time longer and Richard supplied me with the names and telephone numbers of two Ethiopian scholars who he thought might be able to help me with my research – Dr Belai Gedai (who had spent several years making an exhaustive study of his country’s ancient history, drawing heavily on rare Amharic and Ge’ez documents) and Dr Sergew Hable-Selassie of the Institute of Ethiopian Studies, the author of a highly respected work entitled Ancient and Medieval Ethiopian History to 12709 with which I was already familiar.

  The question of what Dimotheos had or had not seen in Axum was still very much at the forefront of my mind and I decided that I would put the problem to Hable-Selassie. I therefore called him, introduced myself, and asked for his opinion on the matter.

  He laughed: ‘Well certainly that fellow did not see the original Tabot of Moses. To satisfy his wish the priests showed him a substitute – not the real one … Here in Ethiopia it is normal for each church to have more than one tabot. In fact some have as many as ten or twelve, which they use for different ceremonial purposes. So he would have been shown one of these. There’s no doubt about that at all.’

  The confident nature of the historian’s response laid to rest any remaining uncertainty that I may have felt about the merits of the Armenian legate’s testimony. The ‘reddish-coloured marble stone’ that he had seen had no value as evidence either for or against Ethiopia’s claim to possess the Ark of the Covenant. Nevertheless his account of his visit to Axum had raised another complicated reservation in my mind – a reservation to do with the whole issue of tabots as a category of sacred objects. As far as I was aware these objects were supposed to be replicas of the Ark of the Covenant – which, as I knew very well, had been a box about the size of a tea-chest. Yet the small marble slab that Dimotheos had been shown had been called a tabot and it had been described as one of the tablets of stone contained inside the Ark.

  This was something that I really needed to clarify. Every Ethiopian church had its own tabot (and, as I now knew, they sometimes had several). But were these tabots really supposed to be replicas of the sacred object, thought to be the Ark, that was kept in the sanctuary chapel in Axum? If that were the case, and if all tabots were flat slabs, then the implication was that that sacred object, too, must be a flat slab – which meant that it could not be the Ark (although it might possibly be one of the tablets of the law on which the Ten Commandments had been inscribed).

  Certainly the tabots that I had seen over my many years of acquaintance with Ethiopia had all been slabs rather than boxes – slabs that had been made sometimes of wood, and sometimes of stone. And certainly, also, it had been this very characteristic that had led the scholar Helen Adolf to conclude that Wolfram von Eschenbach must have had some knowledge of tabots when he had devised his Grail Stone.10

  That was all very well – if tabots were meant to represent the stone tablets that the Ark had contained. On the other hand, if these objects were thought of as replicas of the Ark itself then the Axumite claim to that relic would be severely damaged. I could hardly forget that it
had been precisely this problem – brought starkly to my attention after my visit to the British Museum Ethnographic Store in 1983 – that had caused me to abandon my initial research into the great mystery that was now clamouring for my attention once again. Before going any further, therefore, I felt that it was imperative to establish once and for all exactly what tabots were supposed to be. To this end I telephoned Dr Belai Gedai, the other Ethiopian scholar whom Richard Pankhurst had recommended to me. After introducing myself I got straight to the point: ‘Do you believe,’ I asked, ‘that the Ark of the Covenant is in Ethiopia?’

  ‘Yes,’ he replied emphatically. ‘Not only me but all Ethiopians believe that the Ark of the Covenant is in Ethiopia, kept in the church of Saint Mary of Zion in Axum. It was brought here after the visit of Emperor Menelik I to his father Solomon in Jerusalem.’

  ‘And what about the Ethiopian word tabot? Does that mean “Ark”? Are tabots supposed to be replicas of the Ark in Axum?’

  ‘In our language the correct plural of tabot is tabotat. And, yes, they are replicas. Because there is only one original Ark and because the ordinary people need something tangible to which they may attach their faith, all the other churches make use of these replicas. There are now more than twenty thousand churches and monasteries in Ethiopia and every one of them has at least one tabot.’