The Sign and the Seal

by Graham Hancock

  Quite naturally:

  David was afraid of the Lord that day and said, ‘How can I harbour the Ark of the Lord after this?’ He felt he could not take the Ark of the Lord with him to the City of David.65

  Instead he ‘turned aside and carried it to the house of Obed-edom the Gittite.’66 At that house, while the Jewish monarch waited to see if it would kill anyone else, the Ark of the Covenant remained for three months. No further disasters occurred, however. On the contrary: ‘Yahweh blessed Obed-edom and his whole family.’67 The Scriptures are not explicit about the nature of this benediction. According to ancient folk traditions, however, ‘it consisted in Obed-edom being blessed with many children … The women in his house gave birth after a pregnancy of two months only and bore six children at one time.’68

  The Bible takes up the story again as follows:

  It was told King David, saying, the Lord hath blessed the house of Obed-edom and all that pertaineth unto him, because of the Ark of God. So David went and brought the Ark of God from the house of Obed-edom into the City of David with gladness.69

  On this journey:

  the children of the Levites bare the Ark of God upon their shoulders with the staves thereon, as Moses had commanded according to the word of God.70

  Then, finally, David led the joyous procession into Jerusalem ‘with shouting and with the sound of the trumpet’,71 and with music played ‘on all manner of instruments made of fir wood, even on harps, and on psalteries, and on timbrels, and on coronets, and on cymbals.’72

  It had been David’s hope that he would be able to build a temple in Jerusalem in which the Ark could be housed. In the event, however, he was not to fulfil this ambition and instead had to content himself with placing the relic in a simple tent of the type that had been used during the desert wanderings.73

  The honour (or the conceit?) of erecting the Temple was therefore left to another man. As David himself put it before he died:

  As for me, I had it in mine heart to build an house of rest for the Ark of the Covenant of the Lord … and had made ready for the building … But God said unto me, Thou shalt not build an house for my name … Solomon thy son, he shall build my house.74

  This prophecy was duly fulfilled. At Solomon’s command, work was started on the Temple around the year 966 BC75 and was completed rather more than a decade later, probably in 955 BC.76 Then, when all was done, the Holy of Holies – a place which the Lord had ordered should be utterly dark – was made ready to receive the precious object that it had been built to contain:

  Solomon assembled the elders of Israel, and all the heads of the tribes … that they might bring up the Ark of the Covenant of the Lord … And all the elders of Israel came, and the priests took up the Ark. And they brought up the Ark of the Lord … And King Solomon, and all the congregation of Israel that were assembled unto him, were with him before the Ark, sacrificing sheep and oxen that could not be told nor numbered for multitude. And the priests brought in the Ark of the Covenant of the Lord to its place in the Temple … in the Holy of Holies.77

  And there the sacred relic remained, enveloped in ‘thick darkness’, until it mysteriously vanished at some unknown date between the tenth and sixth centuries BC.78 As I have already indicated in Chapter 1, absolutely no explanation exists for its disappearance, which scholars regard as one of the great unsolved riddles of the Bible.79 Almost equally puzzling, however, are the awesome powers that it seems to have possessed in its heyday – powers portrayed in the Old Testament as stemming directly from God.

  Deus ex machina

  In trying to understand the Ark, I found myself returning again and again to the perplexing issue of these powers. What could have accounted for them? It seemed to me that there were three possible answers:

  1 The Old Testament was right. The Ark was indeed a repository of divine energies and these energies were the source of all the ‘miracles’ that it performed.

  2 The Old Testament was wrong. The Ark was just an ornate casket and the children of Israel were the victims of a collective mass hallucination that lasted for several hundred years.

  3 The Old Testament was both right and wrong at the same time. The Ark possessed genuine powers, but those powers were neither ‘supernatural’ nor divine. On the contrary, they were man-made.

  I looked into all three options and concluded that I certainly could not accept the first unless I was also prepared to accept that Yahweh, the God of the Israelites, was a psychopathic killer – or a kind of malign genie who lived in a box. Nor could I accept the second – primarily because the Old Testament, which is a compilation of books codified in widely different periods, was remarkably consistent where the Ark was concerned. Throughout the Scriptures it was the only artefact explicitly and unambiguously portrayed as being imbued with supernatural energies. All other man-made objects were treated quite matter-of-factly. Indeed even exceptionally holy items such as the seven-branched golden candlestick known as the menorah, the so-called ‘table of the showbread’, and the altar upon which sacrifices were performed, were clearly understood to be nothing more than important pieces of ritual furniture.

  The Ark was therefore quite unique, unrivalled in the special reverence accorded to it by the scribes, and matchless in the awesome deeds attributed to it throughout the lengthy period in which it completely dominated the biblical story. Moreover its alleged powers showed few signs of having fallen victim to imaginative literary embellishment. On the contrary, from the time of its construction at the foot of Mount Sinai until its sudden and unexplained disappearance hundreds of years later, it continued to exhibit the same spectacular but limited repertoire. Thus it continued to lift itself, its bearers, and other objects around it off the ground; it continued to emit light; it continued to be associated with a strange ‘cloud’ that materialized ‘between the cherubim’; it continued to afflict people with ailments like ‘leprosy’80 and ‘tumours’; and it continued to kill those who accidentally touched or opened it. Significantly, however, it exhibited none of the other marvellous characteristics that one might have expected if a mass hallucination had been involved or if a great deal of fiction had been allowed to adulterate the record: for example, it did not make rain; it did not turn water into wine; it did not resurrect the dead; it did not drive out devils; and it did not always win the battles into which it was taken (although it usually did).

  In other words, throughout its history, it consistently behaved like a powerful machine that had been designed to carry out certain very specific tasks and that only performed effectively within its design parameters – although even then, like all machines, it was fallible because of defects in its construction and because it was subject both to human error and to wear and tear.

  I therefore formulated the following hypothesis, in line with the third alternative set out above: the Old Testament had indeed been both right and wrong at the same time. The Ark had possessed genuine powers, but those powers had been neither supernatural nor divine; on the contrary, they must have been the products of human skill and ingenuity.

  This, of course, was only a theory – a speculation intended to guide my further research – and it was confronted by a great many legitimate doubts. Most important of all, how could men possibly have manufactured so potent a device more than three thousand years ago, when technology and civilization had supposedly been at a very rudimentary stage?

  This question, I felt, lay at the heart of the mystery. In seeking to answer it I found that I had to consider first and foremost the cultural context of the sacred relic – a context that was almost entirely Egyptian. After all, the Ark was built in the wilderness of Sinai within a very few months after Moses had led his people out of their captivity in Egypt – a captivity that had lasted for more than four hundred years.81 It therefore followed that Egypt was the most likely place in which to find clues to the Ark’s true nature.

  Tutankhamen’s legacy

  I became convinced that I was right about thi
s after I had paid a visit to the Cairo Museum. Located in the heart of Egypt’s capital city, close to the east bank of the Nile, this imposing building is an unequalled repository of Pharaonic artefacts dating back as far as the fourth millennium BC. One of the upper floors is given over to a permanent exhibition of objects recovered from the tomb of Tutankhamen, the youthful monarch who ruled Egypt from 1352 to 1343 BC – i.e. about a century before the time of Moses.82 I was entranced by this exhibition and spent several hours wandering amongst the display cases amazed at the beauty, variety and sheer quantity of the relics on view. It did not surprise me to learn that the renowned British archaeologist Howard Carter had taken six full years to empty the great sepulchre that he had found in the Valley of the Kings in 1922.83 However, what interested me most of all about the treasures that he had unearthed was that they included dozens of Ark-like chests or boxes, some with carrying poles, some without, but all of them conceptually similar to the Ark of the Covenant.

  By far the most striking of these objects were the four shrines that had been built to contain the sarcophagus of Tutankhamen. These shrines, which I studied closely, took the form of large rectangular caskets that had originally been positioned one inside the other but that were now installed in separate display cases. Since each casket was made of wood, and since each, moreover, was plated ‘inside and out with pure gold’,84 it was difficult to resist the conclusion that the mind that had conceived the Ark of the Covenant must have been familiar with objects like these.

  Further support for this inference was provided by the presence on the doors and rear walls of each of the shrines of two mythical figures: tall and terrible winged women, fierce and imperious in stature and visage – like stern angels of vengeance. These powerful and commanding creatures, placed so as to provide ritual protection for the precious contents of the tomb, were thought to be representations of the goddesses Isis and Nephthys.85 While that identification in itself held no special significance for me, I could not help but note that the deities had their ‘wings spread upwards’ just like the cherubim referred to in the biblical description of the Ark. They also faced each other just as the biblical cherubim had done. And although they were shaped in high relief on the flat planes of the doors (rather than being distinct pieces of statuary) they were nevertheless fashioned ‘of beaten gold’ – again very much like the cherubim described in the Bible.86

  No scholar, I knew, had ever been able to establish exactly what those cherubim had looked like. There was only consensus that they could in no way have resembled the chubby angelic ‘cherubs’ of much later western art, which were, at best, sanitized and Christianized interpretations of a truly ancient and pagan concept.87 Lost in thought in the Cairo Museum, however, it seemed to me that the formidable winged guardians of Tutankhamen’s inter-nested shrines were the closest models that I was ever likely to find for the two cherubim of the Ark, which indeed had been conceived as standing sentinel over it and which had also frequently served as channels for its immense and deadly power.

  The tabotat of Apet

  I was subsequently to discover that the Ark’s Egyptian background was wider and deeper even than this. Tutankhamen had also left another legacy which helped me to understand the full significance of that background. During a visit to the great temple at Luxor in Upper Egypt in April 1990, while passing through the elegant colonnade that extends eastwards from the court of Rameses II, I came across a story carved in stone – a permanent and richly illustrated account of the important ‘Festival of Apet’ which had been inscribed here in the fourteenth century BC on Tutankhamen’s direct orders.88

  Although now badly eroded by the passage of the millennia, the faded reliefs on the west and east walls of the colonnade were still sufficiently visible for me to grasp the rudiments of the festival, which in Tutankhamen’s time had marked the peak of the annual Nile flood upon which almost all of Egypt’s agriculture depended.89 I already knew that this perennial inundation (today held back by the Aswan High Dam with profoundly unfortunate ecological consequences) had been almost exclusively the product of the long rainy season in the Ethiopian highlands – a deluge that every year roared down out of Lake Tana and along the Blue Nile bestowing hundreds of thousands of tons of rich silt on the farmlands of the Delta and contributing an estimated six-sevenths of the total volume of water in the Nile river system.90 This opened up the possibility that the Apet ceremonials might in some way prove relevant to my quest: after all, they had celebrated a clear link between the life of ancient Egypt and events in far-off Ethiopia. Most probably this link had been no more than a coincidental one to do with climate and geography; nevertheless I regarded it as being of at least prima facie interest.

  It turned out to be far more than that.

  Studying first the western wall of the colonnade on which the Tutankhamen reliefs were displayed, my eye was caught by what appeared to be an Ark, lifted shoulder high on its carrying poles by a group of priests. Stepping closer I quickly confirmed that this was indeed the case: with the sole proviso that the object being transported took the form of a miniature boat rather than a casket, the scene before me looked like quite a faithful illustration of the passage in the first book of Chronicles which states that the Levitical priests of ancient Israel ‘carried the Ark of God with the shafts on their shoulders as Moses had ordered’.91

  Standing back to get perspective I established that the entire western wall of the colonnade was covered with images very similar to the one that had initially attracted my attention. In what seemed to be a massive and joyous procession I was able to make out the shapes of several different Ark-like boats being carried on the shoulders of several different groups of priests, before whom musicians played on sistra and a variety of other instruments, acrobats performed, and people danced and sang, clapping their hands in excitement.

  With my pulse quickening I sat down in a patch of shade around the broken base of a column and reflected on the implications of the huge sense of déjà vu that had just overtaken me. It was barely three months since I had attended Timkat in the Ethiopian city of Gondar on 18 and 19 January 1990. The details of the ceremonials that I had witnessed during those two days of religious frenzy were therefore still fresh in my mind – so fresh in fact that I could hardly fail to note the similarities between them and the ecstatic procession portrayed on the time-worn stones of this Egyptian temple. Both events, I realized, focussed around a kind of ‘Ark worship’, with the Arks being borne aloft by groups of priests and adored by hysterical crowds. Nor was this all: Timkat had been characterized by the performance of wild dances and the playing of musical instruments before the Arks. This sort of behaviour, it was now clear, had also been an intrinsic part of the Apet festival, right down to the types of musical instruments used, which in many cases were identical to those that I had seen in Gondar. Of course the flat slabs of the tabotat carried on the heads of the Ethiopian priests were rather different in appearance from the Ark-like boats carried on the shoulders of their long-dead Egyptian counterparts. From my earlier research, however (detailed at some length in Chapter 6), I could hardly forget that according to established etymologies the original meaning of tabot had been ‘ship-like container’. Indeed, as I knew very well, the archaic Hebrew word tebah (from which the Ethiopic term had been derived92) had been used in the Bible to refer specifically to ship-like arks, namely the ark of Noah and the ark of bulrushes in which the infant Moses had been cast adrift on the Nile. Nor, I now realized, could it possibly be irrelevant that the Kebra Nagast had at one point described the Ark of the Covenant as ‘the belly of a ship’93 containing ‘the Two Tables which were written by the finger of God.’94

  After catching my breath, I stood up and stepped out from my patch of shade into the fierce mid-day sunlight that bathed the whole of the colonnade area. I then continued my examination of the faded reliefs of the Apet festival which, on the western wall, concerned the bringing of the arks from Karnak to the Temple at Luxo
r (a distance of about three miles) and, on the eastern wall, showed the procession’s eventual return from Luxor back along the Nile to Karnak again where, with all due ceremony, the sacred vessels were reinstalled in their original resting places. Every detail of these complex and beautifully carved scenes reminded me irresistibly of Timkat in Gondar – which had also involved an outgoing procession (bringing the tabotat from the churches to the ‘baptismal’ lake beside the old castle) and a returning procession (bringing the tabotat back to their home churches again). Moreover, I could now see clearly that the bizarre ceremonies I had witnessed in the early morning of 19 January at the lake itself had also been prefigured in the Apet festival which, at every stage, appeared to have involved a special reverence for water (indeed, the reliefs of the early part of the procession showed that the arks had been carried directly from the temple to the banks of the Nile, where a number of elaborate rituals had then been performed).

  Scholarly corroboration

  After completing my trip to Egypt in April 1990 I took the opportunity to carry out some further research into the evidence that I had stumbled upon there. I discovered that the experts had no quarrel with my various conjectures. At one meeting, for example, Kenneth Kitchen, Professor of Egyptology at Liverpool University, confirmed that the caskets from Tutankhamen’s tomb that I had seen in the Cairo Museum could indeed have been prototypes for the Ark of the Covenant: ‘At the very least,’ he said in his broad and rather emphatic Yorkshire accent, ‘they prove that wooden boxes lined with gold were standard artefacts of the religious furniture of the period and that Moses would therefore have had the technology and skills at his disposal to manufacture the Ark. The methods of construction that he would have employed, and the use of such prefabricated structures for religious purposes, are abundantly attested by actual remains, pictures and texts in Egypt over a long period of time.’95