The Sign and the Seal

by Graham Hancock

  When I returned to my hotel I was carrying the weighty tomes that Krekeler had mentioned. They fully repaid the long night that I spent studying them.

  The Ark in Elephantine

  Here is what I learned about the Jewish Temple on Elephantine – the key facts of relevance to my quest, as I recorded them in my notebook:

  1 The temple, as Krekeler told me, must have been a building of some considerable size. Quite a lot of information about its appearance survived in the papyri and the archaeologists have concluded that its dimensions were ninety feet long by thirty feet wide.3 In old measurements this is, of course sixty cubits by twenty cubits.4 Interestingly, the Bible gives exactly the same measurements for Solomon’s Temple in Jerusalem.5

  2 The Elephantine Temple was roofed with cedarwood;6 so was Solomon’s Temple.7

  3 It seems, therefore, that Soloman’s Temple must have provided the model for the Elephantine Temple. Since the former had originally been built to accommodate the Ark of the Covenant, is it not probable that the latter was as well?

  4 Animal sacrifice was routinely practised at the Elephantine Temple – including the all-important sacrifice of a lamb as the opening rite of Passover week.8 This is highly significant since it indicates that the Jewish community must have migrated to Elephantine before the reforms of King Josiah (640- 609 BC). Those reforms conclusively banned sacrifice at any location other than the Jerusalem Temple (a ban that was subsequently respected even by the exiles during the captivity in Babylon). On Elephantine, however, sacrifice continued to be an important ritual for the Jews in the sixth and fifth centuries BC.9 Since those Jews were engaged in a regular correspondence with Jerusalem there can be no doubt that they would have known about Josiah’s ban. Nevertheless, they continued to perform sacrifices. They must, therefore, have felt that they had some special authority so to do. It goes without saying that the presence of the Ark of the Covenant in their temple would have provided them with all the authority they needed.

  5 In this connection it is worthy of note that the Elephantine Jews clearly thought that Yahweh resided physically in their temple: a number of papyri speak of him – in no uncertain terms – as ‘dwelling’ there.10 In ancient Israel (and during the wanderings in the wilderness) Yahweh was believed to reside wherever the Ark was;11 indeed this belief only really changed after the loss of the Ark had been recognized.12 When the Jews of Elephantine spoke of Yahweh as a deity who was physically present with them, therefore, it follows that they could well have been referring to the Ark.

  6 The Elephantine Jews frequently spoke of the deity dwelling in their temple as ‘the Lord of Hosts’ or ‘Yahweh of Hosts’.13 Scholars recognize this phrase as an archaic one.14 It was frequently used in connection with the Ark (e.g. in the period before Solomon’s Temple was built ‘the people sent to Shiloh that they might bring from thence the Ark of the Covenant of the Lord of Hosts.’15).

  7 All the above factors lend credibility to the view that the Ark could have been lodged in the Elephantine Temple – and, indeed, that its presence on the island could have been the reason for the building of that Temple in the first place. Krekeler was right to tell me that no exact date of construction has yet been established. From the literature, however, it is clear that the scholars who analysed the papyri did a great deal of work on precisely this subject. They point out that by the early seventh century BC there was already a substantial Jewish population on the island of Elephantine, made up mainly of a garrison of mercenaries in the pay of the Egyptians. These Jewish soldiers, together with their families, would have constituted a viable social context for temple worship. On the basis of this and a great deal of other evidence, the considered opinion of the scholars is therefore that the Elephantine Temple must have been built by the year 650 BC.16

  8 It is impossible to overstate the significance of this date. Why? Because it falls during the reign of Manasseh – the king who introduced an idol into the Holy of Holies of the Jerusalem Temple, thus causing the Ark to be removed (probably by priests who remained loyal to the traditional worship of Yahweh). It was a difficult enough task to establish that the sacred relic must indeed have been taken out at this time17 – but, having completed that task, I am satisfied that there is no evidence in the Bible about where it might have been taken to (even Professor Menahem Haran was unable to put forward any theories as to what could have happened to it after it left Jerusalem).

  9 The academic authorities who studied the Elephantine papyri, and who arrived at the date of 650 BC for the construction of the Temple, were clearly not aware that the Ark could have gone missing from Jerusalem during the reign of Manasseh. If they had been then they would certainly have put two and two together. They were aware, however, of the widespread outrage caused by that monarch’s ‘pagan innovations’, and they concluded that this outrage was the only possible explanation for the otherwise inexplicable fact that a Jewish temple was built on Elephantine:

  Manasseh’s reign was accompanied by much bloodshed and it may be surmised that priests as well as prophets opposed his paganisation. Some of the priests fled to Egypt, joined the Jewish garrison at Elephantine, and there … erected the Temple.18

  10 These are the words of Bezalel Porten, author of the authoritative study Archives from Elephantine. Porten nevertheless remains puzzled by the fact that a Jewish temple could have been built at Elephantine at all, because of the notion, deeply entrenched within Judaism, ‘that foreign soil was unclean and that, therefore, no Temple to the Lord might be erected on it.’19 He points out that, after the destruction of Solomon’s Temple in Jerusalem, the Jews carried off into exile in Babylon ‘were counselled by Jeremiah to settle down and pray (not sacrifice) to the Lord.’ The same author then adds: ‘there is no evidence that any Temple to YHWH was erected in Babylonia’ and asks: ‘With what justification, then, did the Jews at Elephantine erect their temple?’20

  11 It seems to me that the answer to Porten’s rhetorical question is obvious: their justification was that they had brought with them from Jerusalem the Ark of the Covenant and that they now needed to build ‘an house of rest’ for it,21 just as Solomon had done so long before.

  Elephantine and the Falashas

  When I returned to England I felt quite confident that I had at last uncovered the real sequence of events underlying the mystery of the lost Ark.

  Seeking supporting evidence I went to the School of Oriental and African Studies in London and acquired copies of the two out-of-print volumes that Achim Krekeler had lent me, volumes that I now wanted to examine much more thoroughly. I also assembled other relevant sources, including The History of Herodotus (because I had learned that the famous Greek scholar had paid a visit to Elephantine around the year 450 BC22).

  This further research effort proved fruitful. One thing that had been bothering me, for example, was why Josiah – the zealous traditionalist who had inherited the throne in Jerusalem two years after Manasseh’s death – had not sought to get the Ark back from Elephantine. The answer to that question did not prove difficult to find. As I had already established, Josiah’s reforms had not started until the twelfth year of his reign (when he was twenty) and his restoration of the Temple had only begun in the eighteenth year of his reign (622 BC).23 By this time relations between Judah and Egypt had deteriorated dramatically – so much so, in fact, that Josiah was ultimately killed fighting the Egyptians.24 Even if he had known that the Ark had been taken to Elephantine, therefore, he would not have been in a position to enforce its return from a powerful country with which he was at war.

  Having satisfied myself on this point I then moved on to consider the next stage of the lost history that I was attempting to reconstruct – the journey of the Ark from Elephantine into Ethiopia during the fifth century BC. My interview in Jerusalem with the Falasha priest Raphael Hadane had raised the intriguing possibility that the ancestors of Ethiopia’s black Jews might have been migrants from Elephantine – because there could be no doubt t
hat he had been speaking of that island when he had told me that his forefathers had built a temple at Aswan. Moreover the notion that the Falashas might have reached Ethiopia from Elephantine was supported by the findings of my own earlier research. In November 1989 I had been struck by the ‘ethnographic fingerprint’ of Falasha settlement around Lake Tana and – on the basis of this and other evidence – I had concluded that:

  the religion of Solomon could only have entered Ethiopia from the west – through Egypt and the Sudan along the ancient and well-travelled trade routes provided by the Nile and Takazze rivers.

  For some time before reaching that conclusion I had been profoundly dissatisfied with the large body of academic opinion which held that the Falashas were the descendants of Jews from southern Arabia who had arrived in Ethiopia after AD 70 (see Chapter 6). Now, as I followed up the bibliography that the social anthropologist Shalva Weil had dictated to me in Jerusalem, I discovered that a number of other theories had been put forward to challenge the prevailing orthodoxy. Though repeatedly ridiculed by the masters of Ethiopian studies like Professor Edward Ullendorff,25 some of the dissenting voices had suggested that the ancestors of the Falashas could well have been converted to Judaism by migrants from the Jewish colony on the island of Elephantine.26 No doubt there had been extensive commercial and cultural contacts between Yemen and Ethiopia during this period; the reality was, however, that several quite substantial Jewish communities had been established in Egypt for hundreds of years before any Jews had settled in south Arabia. Given the profoundly Old Testament character of Falasha religion, therefore, logic suggested that the Jewish faith must have been carried south-eastwards from Egypt and into Ethiopia in a gradual process of ‘cultural diffusion’.27

  To be sure, there were no absolutely unassailable historical facts linking the Falashas to Elephantine. I did, however, come across a great many tantalizing clues and coincidences which seemed to me to be highly suggestive of such a link. All the evidence was circumstantial and none of it actually proved my theory that the Ark had reached Ethiopia in the fifth century BC after spending two hundred years in the Jewish Temple on Elephantine. Viewed in the context of everything else that I had learned, however – in Israel, in Egypt and in Ethiopia itself – my latest findings took on a different and entirely more persuasive aspect.

  Set out below, as I recorded them in my notebook, are the principal conclusions that I reached and the evidence on which they were based:

  1 The fact that the Jewish community at Elephantine practised sacrifice – and that it continued to do so long after King Josiah’s reforms – is surely highly significant. One of the proofs of the antiquity of Judaism in Ethiopia is the extremely archaic character of Falasha religion, in which animal sacrifice of precisely the kind carried out at Elephantine plays a crucial role.28 This adds weight to the hypothesis that the Falashas are the ‘cultural descendants’ of Jewish migrants from Elephantine and therefore provides strong support for the thesis that the Ark of the Covenant may have been brought to Ethiopia from that island.

  2 In its heyday the Jewish Temple on Elephantine had its own well established priesthood. In the vowel-less language of the papyri these priests are referred to as KHN.29 This word, of course, becomes kahen when the vowels ‘a’ and ‘e’ are added. Falasha priests are also called Kahen.30

  3 One of the names given to the Jewish Temple on Elephantine was MSGD.31 It meant ‘place of prostration’.32 To this day the Falashas in Ethiopia have no synagogues; neither do they have a temple; they do, however, call their simple houses of worship Mesgid33 (i.e. MSGD with the vowels ‘e’ and ‘i’ added). In this context it is also worthy of note that it was exactly in a prostrate position, knees to the ground, that King Solomon once prayed before the Ark of the Covenant of Yahweh.34

  4 In his interview with me in Jerusalem Raphael Hadane said that the Jewish Temple built by his forefathers ‘at Aswan’ had been exempted from a great destruction that had been inflicted upon Egyptian temples by a ‘foreign king’:

  ‘he did not destroy our temple. So when the Egyptians saw that only the Jewish temple was not destroyed they suspected that we were on the side of the invader. Because of this they started to fight against us and they destroyed our temple and we were forced to flee.’

  In 525 BC a foreign king did invade Egypt and did indeed destroy many temples.35 His name was Cambyses and he was the ruler of the expansionist Persian Empire that had been founded by his father Cyrus the Great. The Elephantine papyri preserve this recollection of him:

  when Cambyses came into Egypt he found this [Jewish] Temple built. They [the Persians] knocked down all the temples of the gods of Egypt, but no one did any damage to this Temple.36

  The Persians remained in power in Egypt until very close to the end of the fifth century BC. During this period the Jews on Elephantine co-operated closely with them. It was after their protection had been effectively removed that the Jewish Temple on that island was finally destroyed.37 Raphael Hadane’s folk traditions about the origins of the Falashas are therefore borne out by established historical facts.

  5 Hadane also reported that his people especially venerated the island of Tana Kirkos – the same island to which I was told the Ark had been brought in the fifth century BC. Moreover, Memhir Fisseha, the Christian priest whom I interviewed on that island, told me that the Ark had been kept there ‘inside a tent’ for eight hundred years before being taken to Axum.38 It seems to me hardly surprising that a tent or ‘tabernacle’ might have been used on Tana Kirkos to shelter the Ark. If my theory is correct then the Jews who brought the relic there had just experienced the destruction of their own Temple on Elephantine and would have known also of the earlier destruction of Solomon’s Temple by Nebuchadnezzar. They could well have decided that it was time to abandon formal temples for ever and to return to the pure tradition of the desert wanderings when the Ark had always been housed in a tent.

  6 Last but not least, Raphael Hadane told me that the ancestors of the Falashas reached Ethiopia not only by way of Aswan (i.e. Elephantine) but also that they passed through the city of Meroe ‘where they remained for a short while’. These same two places were also named by Solomon Alemu, the Falasha priest whom I interviewed at the village of Anbober in January 1990. Can it be a coincidence that, after being lost to history for more than 1,500 years, the ruins of Meroe were finally unearthed by – guess who? Answer: they were discovered in 1772 by the Scottish explorer James Bruce.39

  The land of the Deserters

  All this, I felt, very strongly suggested that I was on the right track – and the fact that the site of ancient Meroe had been discovered by none other than my old friend James Bruce only served to quicken my enthusiasm for the chase. The Scottish explorer, I was sure, had made his epic journey to Ethiopia in order to locate the Ark of the Covenant (see Chapter 7). How appropriate therefore that he should also have located the fabled city through which the sacred relic had passed on its journey to the Abyssinian highlands.

  But had it really passed that way? There was still, it seemed to me, one vital question that I had not yet satisfactorily answered: why should the Jews of Elephantine have migrated to the south with the Ark of the Covenant after they left the island? Why not head north – back towards Israel, for example?

  I found that there were several possible explanations for this, all of which could have played a role. For a start, by the fifth century BC, the Jews in Jerusalem had got used to living without the Ark. Solomon’s Temple was long gone and a new one had been built to replace it. This Second Temple, furthermore, was administered by an entrenched priesthood which would definitely not have welcomed competitors from Elephantine.

  By the same token, the Elephantine Jews would have felt alien and out of place in the theological environment afforded by Jerusalem in the fifth century BC. Religious thinking had moved on, God was no longer thought of as the quasi-corporeal deity who had dwelled ‘between the cherubims’, and the forms of worship i
n which the Ark had once occupied centre stage had been largely abandoned.

  The return of the relic would, therefore, have led to many potentially catastrophic problems. It would have been quite obvious to the Elephantine priesthood that in order to avoid these problems they would have to stay away from Jerusalem. But where could they go instead? Clearly, they could not remain in Egypt, since the Egyptians had turned against them and destroyed their Temple. Nor, for the same reason, could they have been sure of safe passage if they had chosen to travel north in order to leave that country. A logical solution, therefore, would have been to turn towards the south. It was not without good reason that the Governor of Aswan and Elephantine was titled ‘Governor of the Door of the Southern Countries’.40 In order to take their precious relic to safety the Jews would only have needed to open that metaphorical ‘door’ and head off into those ‘Southern Countries’, which were known collectively as ‘Ethiopia’ – a Greek word meaning ‘burnt faces’ applied at that time to all areas in which dark-skinned people lived.41

  The fugitives would by no means have been venturing forth into a terrifying terra incognita. On the contrary, there was direct evidence that members of the Jewish community had been involved in military expeditions far to the south as early as the sixth century BC.42 Furthermore, I discovered well documented instances of previous migrations – migrations that had not necessarily involved Jews but that had seen large numbers of people from the Aswan area travelling and settling in ‘the Southern Countries’. For example, Herodotus, the ‘father of History’, reported that four days’ journey beyond Elephantine the river Nile ceased to be navigable: