The Sign and the Seal

by Graham Hancock

  All this makes the Ethiopian case look more and more credible. Nevertheless the Jewish ‘alternatives’ cannot be dismissed out of hand simply because they seem to be a bit flimsy.

  ACTION: find out whether any archaeologists have excavated at Mount Nebo, or in and around the Temple Mount – which are the only two locations proposed by the Jews as the last resting place of the Ark.

  I wrote that note in my hotel room in Jerusalem on the night of Saturday 6 October 1990. Two days later, on the morning of Monday 8 October, I attempted to go back to take a second look at the Temple Mount, and to visit some excavations that I knew were in progress just outside the sacred precincts, perhaps a hundred metres to the south of the Al-Aqsa Mosque. As I approached, however – walking along the city wall from David’s Tower to the Dung Gate – the sound of gunfire and of people screaming forewarned me that something had gone seriously wrong.

  Death on the Mount

  What I had walked into subsequently came to be known as the ‘Temple Mount massacre’, and although it represented the coming to a head of years of hatred between the Jews and the Arabs of Jerusalem, its proximate cause was a demonstration by an ultra-conservative Zionist group known as the ‘Temple Mount Faithful’. The large banner that they carried as they marched up to the Moghrabi Gate bore a Star of David and a provocative inscription in Hebrew which summarized the key issue for all concerned. That inscription read:

  TEMPLE MOUNT – THE SYMBOL OF OUR PEOPLE IS IN THE HANDS OF OUR ENEMIES

  What the demonstrators hoped to do was to enter the Temple Mount itself through the Moghrabi Gate, march up to the Dome of the Rock, and there lay the cornerstone for a proposed Third Temple. This ambition, obviously, was packed with political dynamite: since work began on the construction of the Dome of the Rock in the seventh century AD, the whole of the Temple Mount area had been a sacred site of immense importance to Islam as well as to Judaism. Moreover, much to the chagrin of groups like the ‘Temple Mount Faithful’, it is the Muslims who are in possession of that site – which has contained no Jewish place of worship since the destruction of the Second Temple by the Romans in AD 70. Wishing to defend this status quo – against what must have looked to them like a genuine threat – an estimated five thousand militant Arabs had gathered inside the walls of the Temple Mount and had armed themselves with stones which they planned to hurl down at the approaching Zionists.

  The atmosphere was thus highly charged with emotion when the Temple Mount Faithful began their march on Monday 8 October. And what added enormously to the tension was the location of the Moghrabi Gate through which they intended to pass. Opening out into the main compound less than fifty metres from the front porch of the Al-Aqsa Mosque, this gate is built into the southern end of the Western Wall – the exposed exterior of which, known as the ‘Wailing Wall’, is today the single most important Jewish holy place. Dating back to Second Temple times, it is part of a retaining buttress built by Herod the Great in the late first century BC. It escaped demolition by the Romans in AD 70 (because, said the Midrash, the ‘Divine Presence’ hovered over it) and, in later years, it became a potent symbol of the nationalist aspirations of the Jewish people scattered during the diaspora. Even after the formation of the State of Israel it continued to be administered by the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan and it was not until the Six Day War of 1967 that it was finally incorporated into Israel proper. A large plaza was then cleared in front of it and dedicated as a formal place of worship – where, to this day, Jews from all over the world gather to lament the fact that they have no Temple. To avoid a potentially catastrophic confrontation with Islam, however, Jewish worship in any form continues to be banned on the Temple Mount itself, which remains under the exclusive control of the Muslims of Jerusalem and which directly overlooks the Wailing Wall.107

  By choosing to try to enter the Temple Mount through the Moghrabi Gate, therefore, the Temple Mount Faithful were asking for trouble. Access was in fact denied to them by the Israeli police but, as they turned away, the five thousand Arabs who had gathered inside began to rain down showers of stones – not only on the heads of the zealots who had participated in the march but also on the large numbers of other Jews then making their devotions at the Wailing Wall. In this way something that had started life as an apparently symbolic demonstration was very rapidly transformed into a full-scale riot in which eleven Israeli worshippers and eight policemen were hurt, and in which twenty-one Arabs were shot dead and one hundred and twenty-five seriously injured.

  By the time I arrived on the scene the worst of it was over: piles of stones lay amongst pools of blood at the base of the Wailing Wall; the wounded were being ferried away in ambulances; and the police – dressed in riot gear and armed to the teeth – appeared to be in full control. The Temple Mount itself, having just been stormed by the security forces, was off-limits. So too was the area of excavations immediately to the south that I had intended to visit. Hundreds of angry and excited Jews, a few of them proudly wearing blood-stained bandages, milled around in a decidedly bellicose mood and soon a wild celebration began in front of the Wailing Wall – although exactly why anyone should have rejoiced over the brutal killing of a score of Arab youths was something that I just could not understand.

  Disgusted and depressed I eventually left the area, climbing up the steps that led into the Jewish Quarter of the old city and crossing into the Street of the Chain – along which I had walked a few days previously on my first visit to the Temple Mount. Here I saw further gratuitous violence as the police, carrying guns and truncheons, rounded up Palestinians whom they suspected of having been amongst the rioters. One young man, protesting his innocence in a high-pitched and terrified voice, was repeatedly punched and slapped; another ran at break-neck speed into a narrow alley where he was cornered and beaten before being dragged away.

  Altogether, it had been a most unpleasant morning and it cast a blight over the rest of my stay in Jerusalem. This was so not only because of the human suffering that current events had now directly linked to the place where the Ark had once stood, but also because the Temple Mount and the excavations to the south of it remained sealed off by the security forces until long after I had left Israel. Despite these inauspicious omens, however, I was determined not to waste any of the few days remaining to me in that unhappy country, and I therefore continued with my investigation as best I could.

  Digging up sacred places

  The immediate question that I was seeking to answer was the one that I had jotted down in my notebook on the night of Saturday 6 October: had any efforts been made by archaeologists to dig at the Temple Mount, or at Mount Nebo, in order to test the Jewish traditions about the last resting place of the Ark?

  I began with the excavations that I had tried unsuccessfully to visit on the morning of 8 October. Though I could not now gain access to them, I was able to meet with some of the archaeologists involved in them and to research their findings. What I learned was that proper digging had started here in February 1968 – some eight months after Israeli paratroopers had seized control of Jerusalem in the Six Day War. And although all the excavations were safely outside the sacred precincts of the Temple Mount they had been a focus of controversy from the very beginning. According to Meir Ben-Dov, Field Director of the dig, early opposition came from members of the Higher Muslim Council, who suspected a plot against their interests. ‘The excavations are not in fact a scientific venture,’ they complained, ‘their Zionist objective is rather to undermine the southern wall of the Temple Mount, which is likewise the southern wall of the Al-Aqsa Mosque, as a way of destroying the mosque.’108

  To Ben-Dov’s surprise, Christians were at first almost equally unhelpful. ‘They suspected’, he explained, ‘that the purpose of the excavation was to lay the groundwork for building the Third Temple and the whole business about an archaeological venture was just a cover for an invidious plot. All I can say is that until you actually hear these rumours with your own ears, they sound
like the product of a demonic imagination. Yet more than once – whether in jest or otherwise – people whose exceptional intelligence and abilities as historians and archaeologists are beyond question have come straight out and asked me: “Don’t you intend to reinstitute the Temple?” ’109

  The strongest opposition of all came from the Jewish religious authorities – whose agreement to the dig was required by the government before any work could begin. Professor Mazar of the Archaeological Institute of the Hebrew University led the negotiations with the Sephardi and Ashkenazi Chief Rabbis – both of whom turned him down flat when he first approached them in 1967:

  The Sephardi Chief Rabbi, Rabbi Nissim, explained his refusal by the fact that the area of our proposed dig was a holy place. When asked to elucidate his answer further, he intimated that we might prove that the Wailing Wall was not in fact the western wall of the Temple Mount. Besides, what point was there in taking the chance and conducting a dig for scientific purposes when they were irrelevant anyway? On the other hand the Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi, Rabbi Unterman, agonized over halakhic problems (questions of Jewish law). ‘What will happen,’ he mused aloud, ‘if, as a result of the archaeological excavation, you find the Ark of the Covenant, which Jewish tradition says is buried in the depths of the earth?’ ‘That would be wonderful!’ Professor Mazar replied in all innocence. But the venerable Rabbi told the learned Professor that that was precisely what he feared. Since the Children of Israel are not ‘pure’ from the viewpoint of Jewish religious law, they are forbidden to touch the Ark of the Covenant. Hence it is unthinkable to even consider excavating until the Messiah comes!110

  The rabbi’s concern about the Ark was entirely orthodox. All Jews have indeed been considered to be in a condition of ritual impurity since the destruction of the Second Temple – a condition that is only supposed to end with the coming of the true Messiah.111 Dogma of this sort thus represented a considerable obstacle in the path of the archaeologists. Nevertheless they managed in due course to win the rabbis over – and also to overcome the objections of the representatives of the other two monotheistic faiths descended from the Old Testament worship of Yahweh. The dig went ahead. Moreover, despite the location of the site outside the Temple Mount, a number of artefacts from the days of the First Temple were recovered. Predictably, though, no trace of the Ark of the Covenant was found, and the vast bulk of the discoveries proved to be from the later Second Temple, Muslim and Crusader periods.112

  In summary, therefore, I could see that Meir Ben-Dov’s excavations had certainly not vindicated the Jewish traditions about the concealment of the Ark. But neither had they conclusively disproved those traditions. Only one thing could do that, and that would be a thorough and painstaking dig on the Temple Mount itself.

  My own feeling, as the reader will recall, was that such a dig had been carried out by the Knights Templar long centuries before the discipline of archaeology was ever invented, and that they, too, had failed to find the Ark. Nevertheless I still needed to know whether any excavations had been undertaken in modern times, and if so what had been found. I put these questions to Dr Gabby Barkai, an archaeologist at Jerusalem’s Hebrew University who specializes in the First Temple period.

  ‘Since modern archaeology emerged,’ he told me bluntly, ‘no effort has been made to dig inside the Temple Mount.’

  ‘Why?’ I asked.

  ‘Because it’s the ultimate sacred site. The Muslim authorities are utterly opposed to any kind of scientific investigations being undertaken there. It would be the worst kind of sacrilege from their point of view. So the Temple Mount remains a riddle for archaeology. Most of what we know about it is theoretical and interpretive. Archaeologically we only have the findings of Charles Warren. And Parker of course. He actually did dig inside the Dome of the Rock – in 1910 if I remember correctly. But he wasn’t an archaeologist. He was a lunatic. He was looking for the Ark of the Covenant.’

  I was not sure from this statement whether Barkai had described Parker as a ‘lunatic’ because he had looked for the Ark; or whether he had looked for the Ark because he had been a lunatic; or whether his lunacy had been manifestly apparent before he had started to dig inside the Dome of the Rock. This, however, seemed like an excellent opportunity to refrain from mentioning that I, too, was looking for the Ark. I therefore confined myself to asking the archaeologist where I might find out more about Parker – and about Charles Warren, the other name he had mentioned.

  A couple of days of archive research followed, during which I learned that Warren had been a young lieutenant in Britain’s Royal Engineers who had been commissioned by the London-based Palestine Exploration Fund to excavate the Temple Mount in the year 1867. His work, however, had been confined to much the same areas – outside and to the south of the sacred precincts – that were to be more thoroughly investigated a century later by Meir Ben-Dov and his colleagues.113

  The difference was that Warren had very actively sought permission to excavate inside the Temple Mount as well. But all his efforts had been rebuffed by the Ottoman Turks who then administered Jerusalem. Moreover, on the one occasion when he had managed to cut a tunnel northwards and to burrow under the exterior walls, the sledgehammers and other tools used by his labourers had disturbed the prayers of the faithful going on above them in the Al-Aqsa Mosque. The result had been a hail of stones, a riot, and orders from Izzet Pasha, the governor of the city, that the dig should be suspended forthwith.114

  Despite such difficulties, Warren had refused to be discouraged and had persuaded the Ottomans to let him go back to work again. He had subsequently made several other clandestine attempts to tunnel beneath the Temple Mount, where he had planned to ‘locate and map all the ancient remains’ that he might encounter.115 But he was unable to realize this ambition and reached only the foundations of the exterior walls.116 Of course he did not find the Ark of the Covenant – there was no evidence that it had ever been his intention to look for it anyway. His chief interest had been in the Second Temple period and in this context he did make many discoveries of lasting value to scholarship.117

  The same could not be said for Montague Brownslow Parker, a son of the Earl of Morley, who had gone to Jerusalem in 1909 with the express intention of locating the Ark – and who had made no contribution to scholarship whatsoever.

  Parker’s expedition, later politely described by the renowned British archaeologist Kathleen Kenyon as ‘exceptional by any standards’,118 was the brainchild of a Finnish mystic named Valter H. Juvelius, who in 1906 had presented a paper at a Swedish university on the subject of the destruction of King Solomon’s Temple by the Babylonians. Juvelius claimed to have acquired reliable information about the hiding place – inside the Temple precincts – of ‘the gold-encrusted Ark of the Covenant’, and he also said that a close study that he had made of the relevant biblical texts had revealed the existence of a secret underground passage running into the Temple Mount from some part of the city of Jerusalem. After poring over the reports of Charles Warren’s excavations, he had convinced himself that this secret passage would be found to the south of the Al-Aqsa Mosque, in the area that Warren had already dug. Proffering the lure of the US $200 million that he believed the Ark would be worth if it could be recovered, Juvelius therefore sought investors to finance an expedition which would locate and clear that passage in order to gain access to the treasure.119

  His fund-raising efforts were not crowned with success until, in London, he encountered Montague Brownslow Parker, then aged thirty, and won his support for the venture. Milking his contacts in the British aristocracy and abroad, including members of Chicago’s wealthy Armour family, Parker very quickly managed to raise the useful sum of $125,000. The expedition accordingly went ahead and, by August 1909, had established its headquarters on the Mount of Olives (which directly overlooks the Temple Mount).

  Digging began immediately on the site that Warren had previously so painstakingly explored. Moreover Parker and Juvelius were
not deterred by the fact that their illustrious predecessor had found nothing of enormous significance; on the contrary they proceeded with optimism – since they had by now hired an Irish clairvoyant to assist them in their search for the supposed ‘secret tunnel’.

  Time passed. There were the predictable protests from the faithful of all religious persuasions. And, as winter came, the weather turned foul, flooding the excavations with rivers of mud. Understandably, Parker was discouraged. He called a temporary halt and did not resume the dig again until the summer of 1910. Several months of frenetic activity then followed. The secret tunnel, however, still obstinately refused to reveal itself and, in the meantime, opposition to the whole project had grown decidedly more pronounced. By the spring of 1911 Baron Edmond de Rothschild, a Zionist and a member of the famous international banking family, had made it his personal mission to prevent the potential desecration of the holiest site of Judaism, and to this end had purchased a plot of land adjoining the excavations from which he could directly threaten Parker.

  The young British aristocrat was rattled by this development. In April of 1911, therefore, he abandoned the search for the tunnel and resorted to more desperate means. Jerusalem was then still under the control of the Ottoman Turks and the governor of the city, Amzey Bey Pasha, was not a man known for his scrupulous honesty. A bribe of $25,000 secured his cooperation, and an additional though smaller sum persuaded Sheikh Khalil – the hereditary guardian of the Dome of the Rock – to admit Parker and his team to the sacred site and to turn a blind eye to whatever they did there.

  The work, for obvious reasons, was carried out at dead of night. Disguised as Arabs, the treasure hunters spent a week excavating the southern part of the Temple Mount close to the Al-Aqsa Mosque – where Juvelius and the Irish clairvoyant both believed that the Ark had been buried. These efforts proved entirely fruitless, however, and in the small hours of the morning of 18 April 1911 Parker switched his attentions to the Dome of the Rock, and to the legendary caverns supposed to lie far below the Shetiyyah.