The Sign and the Seal

by Graham Hancock

  On investigating further I discovered that several authorities regarded Eldad as a charlatan and his letter as an improbable piece of fiction. Others, however, felt that much of what he said was firmly grounded in fact.62 I had no hesitation in aligning myself with the latter camp – simply because Eldad’s references to the Abyssinian Jews were too close to the truth about the Falashas to have been pure fabrications. He insisted, for example, that they had emigrated from the Holy Land to Ethiopia in First Temple times, shortly after the separation of the kingdoms of Judah and Israel (i.e. around 931 BC63). In consequence, he said, they did not celebrate festivals instituted after that date such as Purim and Hanukkah. Neither did they have rabbis ‘for these were of the Second Temple and they did not reach them.’64

  I was already well aware of the non-observance of the later festivals by the Falashas, and of the implications of this. On checking I now discovered that they did not have rabbis either: indeed their religious officials were called kahen, a word derived from the Hebrew kohen (more familiar as the common name Cohen) meaning ‘priest’ and dating back to the era of the First Temple.65

  All in all, therefore, it did sound very much as though Eldad had been in Ethiopia as he had claimed, and had given a faithful enough description of the state of Judaism there in the mid-ninth century AD. His report of sustained fighting between the Abyssinian Jews and their neighbours during this period thus also looked quite plausible:

  And their banner is white and written thereon in black is ‘Hear O Israel, the Lord our God is one God’… They are numerous as the sands of the sea, and have no employment but war and, whensoever they fight, they say it is not good for mighty men to flee, let them die young, but let them not flee, let them strengthen their heart unto God, and several times they say and cry all of them together, ‘Hear O Israel, our God is one God’, and then they all take heed.66

  Eldad concluded that the Jewish tribes in Ethiopia had been successful in their warlike endeavours and had ‘placed their hands on the necks of their enemies’.67 This, it seemed to me, was nothing more nor less than a fairly accurate description of the true balance of power between Christians and Jews in the ninth and early tenth centuries AD. It was, after all, at precisely this time that the Christian Solomonic dynasty of Axum had been overthrown. And I already knew from my previous research that this coup d’état had been the work of a Jewish monarch – a great queen named Gudit (or Judit, or possibly Yehudit).

  As outlined in Chapter 5, Gudit’s brief and bloody reign was followed, perhaps half a century later, by the establishment of the Zagwe dynasty, to which King Lalibela had belonged. Although they were almost certainly Jews at the outset, the Zagwes themselves later converted to Christianity and subsequently (about fifty years after Lalibela’s death) abdicated the throne in favour of a monarch claiming Solomonic descent.

  Whatever else it achieved, however, it quickly became apparent to me that the Zagwe interregnum had not halted the chronic state of conflict between the Abyssinian Jews and Christians. As my researches continued I learned that Benjamin of Tudela, a widely travelled Spanish merchant who lived in the twelfth century, had reported the existence of Jews in Ethiopia who were ‘not under the yoke of the Gentiles’, and who had ‘cities and castles on the summits of mountains’. He spoke of wars with the Christians in which the Falashas were normally successful, taking ‘spoil and booty’ at will because no man could ‘prevail against them’.68

  Then, in the fifteenth century, the Jewish traveller Elijah of Ferrara related that he had met a young Falasha in Jerusalem and was told how his co-religionists ‘preserved their independence in a mountainous region from which they launched continual wars against the Christian emperors of Ethiopia.’69

  A hundred years later the Jesuit Bishop of Oviedo asserted that the Falashas hid away in ‘great inaccessible mountains; and they had dispossessed the Christians of many lands which they were masters of, and the kings of Ethiopia could not subdue them, because they have but small forces, and it is very difficult to penetrate into the fastnesses of their rocks.’70

  The bishop was wrong, however. His statement was made in 1557 – by which date, far from ‘dispossessing’ anyone, the Falashas were actually under sustained attack from Christian forces bent, apparently, on genocide. Sarsa Dengel, the Solomonic emperor who ruled from 1563 to 1594, waged a seventeen-year campaign against them – a campaign described by one respected scholar as ‘a veritable crusade, inspired by religious fanaticism.’71

  During the fighting, which saw brutal onslaughts against Falasha strongholds in the Simien mountains west and south of the Takazze river, the defenders acquitted themselves with great dignity. Even Sarsa Dengel’s sycophantic chronicler could not avoid expressing admiration for the courage of one group of Jewish women who, rather than be captured and used by the emperor’s men, hurled themselves off a cliff with the cry ‘Adonai [God] help me’.72

  Later the Falasha king, Radai, was taken prisoner. Offered his life if only he would beg the Virgin Mary for mercy – and death if he would not – he is reported to have said: ‘Is not the mention of the name of Mary forbidden? Make haste! It is better for me that I should depart from a world of lies to a world of justice, from the darkness to the light; kill me, swiftly.’ The emperor’s general, Yonael, answered: ‘If you prefer death, die bravely and bow your head.’ Radai then bowed and Yonael struck him with a great sword: the single blow instantly decapitated the Falasha monarch and passed through his knees also, the blade finally burying itself in the ground. Those who witnessed this horrible scene were said to have admired ‘the courage of the Jew in death who declared the things of the earth are bad and the things of heaven are good.’73

  Towards the end of the same campaign the last two Falasha fortresses in the high Simiens were attacked and overwhelmed despite the bravery of the defenders. In both cases the leaders and their picked men chose suicide rather than captivity.

  This did not bring an end to the persecutions, however. On the contrary, even worse atrocities were committed after 1607 when Emperor Susneyos ascended the throne. He launched a pogrom against all Falashas still living in the vast highland expanses between Lake Tana and the Simien mountains. During the next twenty years of ‘unwarrantable butchery’ thousands were killed in fierce fighting and their children were sold as slaves. The few survivors, according to the detailed account given by the Scottish traveller James Bruce:

  were ordered upon pain of death to renounce their religion, and be baptised. To this they consented, seeing there was no remedy … Many of them were baptised accordingly, and they were all ordered to plough and harrow on the Sabbath day.74

  The upshot of such sustained and vindictive oppression was that it forever deprived Ethiopia’s Jews of the autonomous statehood that they had obviously once enjoyed – and thus hastened their slide into obscurity. Looking back through the admittedly sketchy historical documents at my disposal, I found that it was even possible to chart this gradual submergence and disappearance in numerical terms.

  In the early 1600s, for example, the Falashas were said to have numbered some ‘100,000 effective men’.75 Assuming one ‘effective man’ per family of five, this would give a total population for that period of around 500,000. Nearly three hundred years later – in the late nineteenth century – the Jewish scholar Joseph Halévy put total Falasha numbers at around 150,000.76 By the end of the first quarter of the twentieth century this figure had plummeted to just 50,000 – according to the undoubtedly well-informed estimate of another Jewish investigator, Jacques Faitlovich.77 Sixty years on, in the famine year of 1984, the Falasha population of Ethiopia was reliably estimated at 28,000.78

  My reading left me in no doubt that the watershed had come at the beginning of the seventeenth century with the Susneyos campaigns, which had clearly broken the back of Falasha resistance. Before that they had been a populous and powerful folk with kings and a kingdom of their own; afterwards, disenfranchised and beaten, their numbers remo
rselessly declined.

  The historical record, therefore, more than adequately resolved the contradiction that had been bothering me, namely how to explain the latter-day victimization and impoverishment of the Falashas if it were true that Judaism had been brought to Ethiopia by so exalted a figure as Menelik I – who had also brought the Holy Ark of the Covenant, the most precious and prestigious relic of the ancient world. I now realized that there was no contradiction at all. Indeed a scenario in which the Jewish religion had once enjoyed great influence suggested the only possible motive for the merciless pogroms, killings and mass enslavements that Susneyos and other Christian emperors had inflicted upon their Falasha compatriots. Simply stated, such bizarre and apparently psychopathic behaviour made a twisted kind of sense if the Christians had actively feared the possibility of a resurgence of Judaism – and if their fear had stemmed from the fact that this rival monotheistic faith had earlier represented an extremely strong and enduring theme in Ethiopian life.

  ‘Consummation of heart’s desire …’

  All this, I reasoned, strongly supported the view that Judaism had arrived in Ethiopia long before Christianity. By the same token it also added some social corroboration to the legendary account of Menelik’s abduction of the Ark. To summarize, I now knew that:

  • The Falashas’ archaic traditions of blood sacrifice – as well as some of their other religious practices – cast grave doubt on the academic orthodoxy which favoured a late (and South Arabian) origin for Ethiopian Judaism. On the contrary the evidence suggested quite compellingly that the Jewish faith must have come to Ethiopia in First Temple times and must then have been isolated there. Furthermore, the best possible account of how and why Judaism had taken root in the heart of Africa at so early a date was provided by the Kebra Nagast. Since the story of the abduction of the Ark was central to that account it followed that Ethiopia’s claim to possess the sacred relic deserved to be taken seriously.

  • There was clear evidence to suggest that the Jewish faith had been an important force in Ethiopia long before the arrival of Christianity in the fourth century AD. This evidence also suggested that Jews and Christians had subsequently engaged in a protracted struggle to the death. The winners of this struggle had been the Christians – who had, in the process, captured the Ark of the Covenant. Thereafter they had gradually incorporated it into their own non-Jewish religious ceremonies. This was the only satisfactory explanation for what was otherwise an incomprehensible anomaly – namely the crucial role, unique in the Christian world, played in all Ethiopian church services by replicas of an Old Testament relic.

  • These replicas depicted the contents of the Ark – i.e. the tablets of stone – rather than the Ark itself. This had originally confused me; I now understood, however, that it was merely an example of a culture being ‘economical with its symbols’. In the Holy of Holies of every one of the more than twenty thousand Orthodox churches in Ethiopia was a tabot. Behind these tabotat – and directly responsible for the superstitious dread which they inspired in the general population – lay a mysterious and puissant object. There now seemed to me to be every possibility that that object might indeed be the Holy Ark of the Covenant.

  Of course there were still several loose ends. These included the important issue of the ethnic identity of the Queen of Sheba (could she really have been an Ethiopian?). Linked to this, and of at least equal weight, was another legitimate doubt that the scholars had raised: in the era of Solomon was it really possible that Ethiopia could have possessed a sufficiently ‘high’ civilization to have engaged in direct cultural contact with ancient Israel? Finally there was the problem of Axum – to which Richard Pankhurst had drawn my attention in 1983.79 The sacred city had not even existed in Solomon’s time and therefore the Ark could not have been brought to it. This did not preclude the possibility that the relic might have been deposited at some other place in Ethiopia and then moved to Axum at a later date. If so, where was that ‘other place’ and why had I encountered no traditions concerning it?

  These, I realized, were questions for which I would eventually have to seek answers. There were others, too. Indeed it was perhaps intrinsic to the occult and recondite nature of the Ark of the Covenant that it would always generate questions, confusions, ambiguities and misgivings. An object so rare and precious, imbued with such power, venerated with such fervour over so many centuries – and charged with the numinous energy of God – could hardly be expected to yield up its secrets easily or to any casual inquirer.

  I felt, however, that the evidence I had already unearthed in support of Ethiopia’s claim to be the last resting place of the relic was sufficiently thought-provoking to merit further research. Moreover, when I combined this evidence with the results of the decoding exercise that I had just carried out on Wolfram’s Parzival, I found it difficult to resist the conclusion that two plus two did indeed equal four.

  In short, knowing what I knew now, it seemed to me hardly surprising that the clandestine tradition of quest that I had identified should have focussed on the Abyssinian highlands. After all, for a group of knights whose very identity was bound up with the mysteries of Solomon’s Temple, no real historical relic other than the Ark could possibly have served as a more fitting object of chivalric endeavour. By the same token, there was only one country in which such an endeavour might have been undertaken with any genuine hope of success – a country which had a living institution of Ark-worship, a Solomonic heritage, and a credible claim to possess the Ark itself.

  I therefore believed I was right in my hypothesis that the Templars had launched a quest in Ethiopia in the late twelfth century and I believed that they had found the precious relic which Wolfram had described as ‘the consummation of heart’s desire’.80 As I shall recount in the next chapter, however, I also believed that they had lost it again – that it had been wrested from them and that they had been obliged to quit Ethiopia without it.

  Why? Because a very few intrepid men continued to travel to Ethiopia in search of the Ark long after the utter destruction of the Knights of the Temple of Solomon in the fourteenth century. Furthermore, though they travelled at different periods, and were born in different lands, all these later adventurers were directly linked to the Templars and had inherited their traditions.

  Chapter 7

  A Secret and Never-Ending Quest

  From the first to the sixth century AD the empire centred on the city of Axum in northern Ethiopia could rightly claim to rank amongst the most powerful and prosperous in the known world. It dealt on equal terms with Rome and Persia and sent its navies sailing to ports as far afield as Egypt, India, Ceylon and China. Its architectural and artistic achievements were impressive and it became the first bastion of Christianity in sub-Saharan Africa, adopting the new faith as its official religion in the early fourth century AD (coincidentally at much the same time as the miraculous conversion of Constantine the Great).1

  By the seventh century, however, Axum’s light had begun to dim; the embassies that it sent abroad were now few and far between and its once formidable military power was clearly in decline. This marked change, which eventually led to total isolation, had much to do with the advance of the belligerent forces of Islam and the encirclement of Abyssinian Christianity during and after the lifetime of the Prophet Muhammad (AD 570–632). ‘Encompassed by the enemies of their religion,’ wrote Edward Gibbon in his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, ‘the Ethiopians slept for near a thousand years, forgetful of the world by whom they were forgotten.’2

  The millennium to which the great English historian referred lasted from roughly the seventh to the sixteenth centuries, during which time it would be fair to say that Ethiopia all but disappeared from world consciousness. Formerly well known to outsiders, and relatively well travelled, this Christian country in the remote highlands of Africa was gradually transformed into a mysterious realm of myth and magic in which dragons and other monsters were believed to dwell – a terra inc
ognita where no one dared (or wanted) to venture.

  It would have been tempting to assume that the Abyssinians had reverted to barbarism or stagnated during the long, dark hole in their history. My researches had shown me, however, that the opposite was true: as the extraordinary rock-hewn churches of Lalibela proved, a rich and idiosyncratic culture had been preserved throughout. Moreover, although this culture was introverted and suspicious of the motives of foreign powers, it had stayed in contact with the outside world. Prince Lalibela himself had spent twenty-five years as an exile in Jerusalem in the second half of the twelfth century. And it had been from Jerusalem that he had returned to Ethiopia to claim his kingdom and to build the monolithic churches that now bear his name.

  As outlined in Chapter 5, my findings had convinced me of the possibility that Lalibela might have been accompanied by a contingent of Templars when he left the Holy Land in 1185 to win back his throne. These knights, I believed, would have been motivated first and foremost by a desire to seek out the Ark of the Covenant in Ethiopia. In furtherance of this end it seemed logical to suppose that they would have been more than willing to assist the prince to achieve his own political objectives – since by so doing they might reasonably have expected to gain great influence.

  The reader will recall that I then learned of an Ethiopian tradition which told of the involvement of mysterious ‘white men’ in the construction of the Lalibela churches. This tradition was an ancient one. Indeed, it had already been very old when it had first been recorded in the early sixteenth century by a Portuguese visitor, Father Francisco Alvarez. I knew that the Templars had been great builders and architects,3 and it was therefore difficult to resist the conclusion that they might have been the ‘white men’ who had had a hand in the creation of the rock-hewn monoliths. Furthermore, since the churches were twenty-four years in the making, the implication was that the knights had – at the very least – had a sustained presence in Ethiopia and perhaps had entertained plans for an even longer-term involvement in the affairs of that country.