The Sign and the Seal

by Graham Hancock

  Those who are curious might also wish to give some thought to the peculiar garments that the High Priests of ancient Israel wore when they approached the Ark.162 If they did not wear these garments their lives were believed to be at risk.163 Was this purely a matter of superstition and ritual? Or was protective clothing necessary for some reason that perhaps had to do with the nature of the Ark itself?

  Related to this point is another – the curious coverings, consisting of two layers of cloth and one of leather, that the Ark had to be wrapped in before it could be transported164 (apparently in order to prevent anyone from being killed as a result of accidentally touching it whilst it was on the move165). Even when these precautions had been fully complied with, however, the sacred relic still sometimes caused the death of its bearers. It did so with ‘sparks’.166 But what were these sparks? And were the wrappings – which were all made of non-conductive materials167 – perhaps intended to serve as insulation?168

  Also of some potential interest is the story of Nadab and Abihu, the two sons of Aaron who were struck down by the Ark soon after its installation in the Tabernacle (I have described this incident briefly in Chapter 12; according to the Scriptures a flame leapt out at them ‘and devoured them and they died’169). Surprisingly, Moses completely ignored the normally lengthy Hebrew funeral procedures and instead ordered that the bodies should immediately be taken ‘far away’ out of the camp.170 Why should he have done such a thing? What was it exactly that he feared?

  Moving forward in time, I suggest that those who wish to learn more could do worse than examine the passages in the Bible which recount the dreadful afflictions that the Ark worked amongst the Philistines during the seven months that it spent in their hands after they had captured it at the battle of Ebenezer.171 Again, I have described these events in Chapter 12, but I have also left much unsaid that could be said.

  Many riddles, too, might be solved by a close study of what happened in the years after the Ark was returned to the Israelites by the Philistines and before King Solomon finally installed it in the Holy of Holies of his Temple in Jerusalem. I believe that an explanation exists for the miracles and the terrors that it worked during this period172 – a rational explanation connected to its character as a man-made device and not to any divine or unearthly influences.

  Indeed, my own investigations have led me to conclude that it may only be possible to understand the sacred relic properly when it is seen in this light – not as a repository of supernatural powers but as an artefact and as an instrument. No doubt this instrument was very different from any known to us today, but it was none the less the product of human ingenuity, devised by human hands to fulfil very human objectives. As such its magic and its mystery are not diminished for me. The gift of an ancient and secret science, I think of it as a key to the sealed and unremembered history of our species, a sign of our forgotten glory, and a testament to lost truths about ourselves.

  And what else is the quest for the Ark or the Grail if it is not a quest for knowledge, a quest for wisdom and a quest for enlightenment?

  Part V: Israel and Egypt, 1990

  Where is the Glory?

  Chapter 14

  The Glory is departed from Israel

  In the mid-afternoon of Thursday 4 October 19901 entered the old walled city of Jerusalem through the Jaffa Gate. After passing Omar Ibn el-Khatab Square, with its pleasant cafés and hawkers’ stands, a bewildering maze of narrow streets paved with ancient cobble stones lay ahead of me.

  A few years earlier this whole area would have been seething with shoppers and sightseers; now, however, it was almost deserted. The Palestinian intifada, and recent threats by Iraq to ‘burn’ Israel with Scud missiles, had been enough to drive virtually all foreigners away.

  To my right, as I walked, was the Armenian Quarter and, to my left, the Christian Quarter dominated by the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. Within this great edifice was the Chapel of the Invention of the Cross which the victorious Muslim general Saladin – at the request of King Lalibela – had granted to the Ethiopian community of Jerusalem after the Crusaders had been expelled from the city in AD 1187.1 In later years the Ethiopians had lost their privileges in the chapel. I knew, however, that they still occupied an extensive monastery on its roof.

  I continued in an easterly direction through the silent and deserted alleys, many of which were covered with canvas awnings that cut out the glare and heat of the afternoon sun, creating a cool, almost subterranean atmosphere. A few forlorn shopkeepers sitting in their doorways made half-hearted attempts to sell me souvenirs that I did not want and bags of ripe oranges that I had no desire to carry.

  To my right now, as I proceeded along the Street of the Chain, was the Jewish Quarter where gangs of Hasidic youths dressed in dark suits and incongruous fur hats roamed pugnaciously about, declaring by their body language that they were the masters of all they surveyed. To my left, filled to the brim with unhappiness, frustration and restless despair, was the Muslim Quarter. And straight ahead, rising up above the clutter of the old city like a golden symbol of hope, was the Dome of the Rock – the beautiful mosque erected by the Caliph Omar and his successors in the seventh century AD and regarded as the third most sacred place in the Islamic world.2

  It was the Dome of the Rock that I had come to see, although not because of its significance to Muslims but because it had been built on the original site of the Temple of Solomon. Inside I knew that I would find a great stone, believed by orthodox Jews to be the Shetiyyah – the foundation-stone of the world. And on that stone, in the tenth century BC, amidst the ‘thick darkness’ of the Holy of Holies, the Ark of the Covenant had been placed by Solomon himself.3 Like a man who seeks to conjure up an image of his long-departed lover by caressing some item of her clothing, I therefore hoped that by touching the Shetiyyah I might gain a deeper and more abiding sense of the lost relic that I sought.

  This, however, was not my only purpose on that afternoon in October. Just a few hundred metres to the south of the Dome of the Rock I knew that I would also be able to visit another building of central importance to my quest – the Al-Aqsa Mosque, which the Knights Templar had used as their headquarters in the twelfth century AD. From this base, I suspected, they had sallied forth to conduct investigations of their own in the caverns beneath the Shetiyyah – where certain legends suggested that the Ark had been concealed shortly before the destruction of Solomon’s Temple.4

  It was to the Al-Aqsa Mosque that I went first, slipping off my shoes and entering the cool and roomy rectangular hall believed by Muslims to be the ‘furthermost sanctuary’, to which Muhammad was supposedly transported by angels on his famous Night Journey. Whatever place of prayer existed in the Prophet’s lifetime (AD 570–632) had long since vanished, however, and I was confronted by a medley of different building styles, the oldest of which dated back to around AD 1035 and the most recent to the period 1938–42, when the Italian dictator Mussolini had donated the forest of marble columns that lay ahead of me and when King Farouk of Egypt had financed the restoration and repainting of the ceiling.5

  The Templars, too, had left their mark on the great mosque. Taking up residence here in AD 1119 and not leaving until 1187 when they were driven out of Jerusalem by Saladin, they had been responsible, amongst other things, for the three magnificent central bays of the porch. Much of the other architecture that the knights had added had subsequently been destroyed. Their refectory, however, had survived (being incorporated into the nearby Women’s Mosque), and the vast underground area which they had developed as stables for their horses (the so-called ‘Stables of Solomon’) were also in a good state of repair.6

  As I carefully picked my way in stockinged feet amongst the Muslims who were already assembling for afternoon prayer I felt strangely light-headed but at the same time alert – keyed-up. The jumble of different eras and influences, the old mixed in with the new, Mussolini’s marble columns, and the eleventh-century Islamic mosaics, had all conspi
red to confuse my perceptions. Currents of incense-laden air wafted through the spacious and light-filled interior, summoning up visions of the European knights who had lived and died here so long ago and who had named their strange and secretive order after the Temple of Solomon – the site of which, now occupied by the Dome of the Rock, was only two minutes’ walk away.

  The raison d’être of the Temple had been extremely simple. It had been conceived and designed as nothing more, and nothing less, than ‘an house of rest for the Ark of the Covenant of the Lord’.7 But the Ark, of course, had long since vanished, and the Temple, too, was gone. Utterly and completely destroyed by the Babylonians in 587 BC, the structure erected by Solomon had been replaced half a century later by the Second Temple – which, in its turn, had been razed by the Romans in AD 70. The site had then lapsed into disuse until the arrival of the Muslim armies in AD 638 when the Dome of the Rock had been built.8 Throughout all these changes the Shetiyyah had remained in place. The sacred floor on which the Ark had once stood was therefore the single constant factor that had weathered all the storms of history, that had seen Jews and Babylonians and Romans and Christians and Muslims come and go, and that still endured today.

  Leaving the Al-Aqsa Mosque, and slipping on my shoes again, I now made my way up through the tree-lined precincts of the Temple Mount to the Dome of the Rock – the very name of which reflected its guardianship of the Shetiyyah. A large and elegant octagonal building faced with rich blue tiling, its dominant exterior feature was its massive golden dome (which, indeed, could be seen from many different parts of Jerusalem). To my eye, however, there was nothing overwhelming about this tall and perfect monument. On the contrary it conveyed a complex feeling of lightness and grace coupled with an understated but reassuring strength.

  This first impression was enhanced and completed by the interior of the building, which quite literally took my breath away. The soaring ceiling, the columns and arches supporting the inner octagon, the various niches and recesses, the mosaics, the inscriptions – all these elements and many more melded together in a sublime harmony of proportion and design that gave eloquent expression to humanity’s yearning for the divine and that proclaimed that yearning to be both noble and profound.

  My glance had been drawn upwards when I entered – upwards into the cupola, the farthest reaches of which were lost in the cool darkness overhead. Now, however, as though attracted by some powerful magnetic force, I felt my attention tugged down again towards the very centre of the mosque where a huge tawny rock perhaps thirty feet across, flat in places, jagged in others, lay directly beneath the dome.

  This was the Shetiyyah and, as I approached it, I was aware that my heart was beating more quickly than usual and that my breathing seemed laboured. It was not difficult to understand why the ancients had thought of this great boulder as the foundation-stone of the world or to see why Solomon had chosen it as the centrepiece of his Temple. Rough-textured and asymmetrical, it jutted out above the bedrock of Mount Moriah as solid and as unshakable as the earth itself.

  A carved wooden railing surrounded the whole central area, but into one corner of this railing was set a shrine through which I was allowed to push my hand to touch the Shetiyyah. Its texture, smoothed down by the caresses of countless generations of pilgrims before me, was slick, almost glasslike, and I stood there, lost in my own thoughts, drinking in through the pores of my fingers the immense antiquity of this strange and wonderful stone. Though it was perhaps a small victory, it nevertheless meant a great deal to me to be in this place and to savour this moment of quiet reflection at the source of the mystery that I sought to solve.

  Eventually I withdrew my hand and continued my circuit of the Shetiyyah. At one side a stairway led down to a deep hollow beneath the stone – a cave-like cist known to the Muslims as Bir el-Arweh, the ‘Well of Souls’. Here, according to the faithful, the voices of the dead could sometimes be heard mingled with the sounds of the rivers of paradise. As I entered, however, I could hear nothing except the murmured prayers of the half-dozen or so pilgrims who had preceded me and who were now slumped in obeisance on the cold rock floor invoking in mellifluous Arabic the name of Allah, the Compassionate, the Merciful – a deity whose prophets, long before the time of Muhammad, had included Abraham and Moses and who, in his absolute and uncompromising oneness, was in no way different from Yahweh, the God of the Ark.9

  I already knew that a number of Jewish and Islamic legends spoke of a sealed and secret passage beneath the Well of Souls leading into the bowels of the earth, where the Ark had supposedly been concealed at the time of the destruction of Solomon’s Temple – and where many believed that it rested still, guarded by spirits and demons.10 As noted in Part II, I suspected that the Knights Templar could have been motivated to search here for the Ark in the twelfth century AD after learning of these legends. One variant of the tale that might particularly have excited their interest purported to be an eyewitness account by a certain ‘Baruch’ of an intervention by an ‘angel of the Lord’ only moments before the Babylonian army broke into the Temple:

  And I saw him descend into the Holy of Holies, and take from it the veil, and the Holy Ark, and its cover, and the two tablets … And he cried to the earth in a loud voice, ‘Earth, earth, earth, hear the word of the mighty God, and receive what I commit to you, and guard them until the last times, so that, when you are ordered, you may restore them, and strangers may not get possession of them …’ And the earth opened its mouth and swallowed them up.11

  If the Templars had indeed been inspired by this text to search beneath the Well of Souls they would not, I was absolutely confident, have found the Ark there. The so-called ‘Apocalypse of Baruch’ (from which the above quotation is taken) might easily have seemed to them like a genuinely ancient document dating from the sixth century BC. The truth, however, as modern scholarship had subsequently revealed, was that it was written in the late first century AD and that it therefore could not possibly have been an eyewitness account of the concealment of the sacred relic, whether by an angel or by any other agency. On the contrary it was, from beginning to end, a work of imaginative fiction which, despite its eerie and evocative tone, possessed no historical merit whatsoever.12

  For this and other reasons, I felt sure that the Templars would have been frustrated in their excavations beneath the Temple Mount. But I also suspected that they had later learned of Ethiopia’s claim to be the last resting place of the Ark and that a group of knights had ultimately gone there to investigate this claim for themselves.13

  I, too, was following the same trail that those knights had stumbled upon so many centuries before, and I felt that it pointed compellingly towards the sanctuary chapel in the sacred city of Axum. Before attempting to make my own way into the war-torn highlands of Tigray, however, I wanted to be absolutely satisfied that there was no other country or place where the lost relic could be. It was that desire that had brought me to the original site of the Temple of Solomon on 4 October 1990. And it was that desire that had drawn me to the Shetiyyah, on which the Ark had once stood and from which it had vanished.

  That was my starting point, but now I intended to use the rest of my stay in Jerusalem to talk to religious and academic authorities and to examine in the greatest possible depth all the circumstances known to have surrounded the mysterious disappearance of the relic. Only if I was still confident of the basic merit of the Ethiopian claim after I had completed that exercise would I finally commit myself to the Axum adventure. The January 1991 Timkat ceremonials at which I hoped that the object believed to be the Ark would be carried in procession were, however, less than four months away. I was therefore acutely aware that my time was running out.

  What house can you build me?

  The installation of the Ark in the Temple of Solomon, which – as I had already established – must have taken place around the year 955 BC,14 was described in the first book of Kings:

  Then Solomon assembled the elders of Isr
ael … And the priests brought in the Ark of the Covenant of the Lord to its place in the Temple … in the Holy of Holies … And it came to pass, when the priests were come out of the holy place, that the cloud filled the house of the Lord, so that the priests could not stand to minister because of the cloud: for the glory of the Lord had filled the house of the Lord. Then spake Solomon, ‘The Lord said that he would dwell in the thick darkness. I have surely built thee a house to dwell in,, a settled place for thee to abide in forever … But will God indeed dwell on the earth? behold, the heaven and heaven of heavens cannot contain thee; how much less this house that I have builded?’15

  According to the Scriptures, Solomon had later ‘turned away his heart after other gods’ and had worshipped with particular enthusiasm ‘Ashtoreth the goddess of the Zidonians and … Milcom the abomination of the Amorites’.16 Because of this tendency to apostasy I found it difficult to believe that the monarch whose legendary wisdom was said to have excelled ‘all the wisdom of Egypt’17 had ever really held Yahweh in especially high esteem. And for the same reason I did not think that he had been paying metaphysical tribute to the omnipotence and omnipresence of the God of Israel when he had expressed his doubts about the ability of the Temple to ‘contain’ the Ark. On the contrary, it seemed to me that when Solomon had uttered these curious words he had been giving voice to genuine fears of a pragmatic rather than of a spiritual nature. Might not the sacred relic still break free, even though it was anchored now to the very foundation-stone of the world? Might not the unpredictable energies pent up within it still be sufficiently potent and dangerous to burn through the thick darkness of the Holy of Holies and to destroy the great ‘house’ that had been erected around it?