The Knights Templar
Picture this. A damp February Sunday afternoon, a glass of red wine and a box of shortbread, snuggled under blankets with children, watching Stephen Spielberg's Indiana Jones movie, Raiders of the Lost Ark. You need know nothing about Ark of the Covenant, nothing about Himmler's Nazi treasure hunters at Wewelsburg, nothing about the Ark legends of Axum in Ethiopia. It's a fun film, time and again. A timeless story of the most fundamental kind. Good versus evil, the conversation between God and His world.
The story of the Ark is one of the most extraordinary in the Bible. In the second book of the Old Testament, Exodus, chapter 25, God tells Moses the exact measurements and the precise materials to be used when building the Ark. Inside this sacred box are to be placed the tablets of stone, on which the Ten Commandments are inscribed God's laws for his Chosen People.
Such was the power of the Ark that it was transported through the wilderness wrapped in thick black cloths. In Exodus and the fifth Old Testament book, Deuteronomy, the Ark's awesome power is described. After coming down from Mount Sinai for the second time, Exodus 34:29 describes the physical change in Moses – 'the skin of his face shone' – and ever afterwards he wore a veil. At the Battle of Jericho, Joshua simply marched around the wall seven times carrying the Ark of the Covenant and the impregnable fortifications collapsed, allowing the Israelites to take victorious possession of the city. King Uzziah was smitten with leprosy after approaching the Ark and two of the sons of Moses himself, Nadab and Abuhu, were struck dead as they looked upon its terrible power.
Remember the final scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark …
By 996 BC, the wanderings of the Jews were over. Solomon, the son of David, began the building of a Temple to house the Ark in Jerusalem. By 955 BC the Ark is placed in the Holy of Holies of Solomon's Temple.
Then, sometime before the reign of Josiah, between 740 and 640 BC, the Ark disappears. Both from the Bible and from history itself.
Before the reign of Solomon, there are some 200 Old Testament references to the Ark of the Covenant. After Solomon's death in 931 BC, it is barely mentioned again. And when the armies of Nebuchadnezzar sack Jerusalem and destroy the Temple in 587 BC, the Ark is not listed among the treasures stolen. When the building of the Second Temple was completed around 517 BC, the priesthood could no longer hide the fact that the holiest relic of all had been lost.
Stories of the theft of the Ark of the Covenant are legion. According to the sacred Ethiopian book the Kebra Nagast, Menelik, the son of the Queen of Sheba and Solomon, stole the Ark and took it back to Ethiopia with him, to the ancient holy city of Axum, around the year 950 BC. Another legend says the Ark followed Menelik of its own accord!
Although most historians would consider the Kebra Nagast folk legend rather than an accurate record of fact, nonetheless there are many reasons why Ethiopia might be a legitimate candidate for the final resting place of the Ark.
An annual festival celebrating the power of the Ark of the Covenant still takes place in Ethiopia on the 18th and 19th of January. The ceremony is brilliantly described in Graham Hancock's The Sign and the Seal, where he paints an extraordinarily rich and complex picture of the ritual in the ancient Ethiopian 'Holy City' of Axum in the war-torn north-western province of Tigray
There was only one Christian country outside Europe during the Middle Ages – the kingdom of the infamous Prester John, a supposedly Christian ruler who reigned at the same time as Philip the Fair of France. Historians and archeologists cannot agree on the modern-day location of Prester John's kingdom, but many people believe it was the country now called Ethiopia.
Even today, despite years of impoverishing civil war in Ethiopia, each temple has a timkat – an ark replica – which contains the tabotat, wooden tablets representing the tablets of stone of the Ten Commandments. The most recent Ethiopian tabot was found among the possessions of an Edinburgh priest in 2001, brought back by his missionary ancestor in the early 19th century.
In the Ethiopian highlands, there is a community of Jews - the Falashas – who claim descendance from Solomon himself. This African people practised a form of pre-Talmudic Judaism that had disappeared by the foundation of the Second Temple. Their belief and ritual was based on the Torah, the collection of the first five books of the Old Testament – Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deutronomy – supposedly written by Moses himself.
Most of the Falashas were either airlifted to Israel from refugee camps in the Sudan in 1984/5 – Operation Moses – or they were wiped out by Ethiopian dictator Mengistu's hit men. But there are still a few thousand Falasha Jews remaining, practising these ancient customs, beliefs and faith.
As if a community of Jews arrived from the Holy Land many years before the before the development of the Talmud as the basis for modern Judaic law.
Finally.
There is an extraordinary cathedral in Chartres in northern France, known as a 'book in stone'. Some say it was built by or for the descendants of the Poor Knights of the Temple of Solomon – the Knights Templar – as a way of preserving secret, coded knowledge.
In the north porch of Chartres Cathedral – the first Gothic cathedral – there is a stone pillar with a carving which might just show the Ark of the Covenant being carried away from Jerusalem by Menelik. Underneath is a mysterious inscription: Hic Amititur Archa Cederis. The Latin does not really make sense, although guide books translate Archa Cederis as: 'you are to work through the Ark' and the entire inscription as - 'here things take their course: you are to work through the Ark.'
However, if one assumes cederis to be a corruption of foederis, as some scholars suggest, then the inscription might be translated as: 'here it is let go, the Ark of the Covenant'
Above the north door of Chartres cathedral – sometimes known as the Door of the Initiates – there is another carving, an eerie procession of kings and queens of the Old Testament. It is the only significant representation of the Old Testament in the cathedral. The story of Menelik was – according to historians – not known in Europe until the 15th century. The re-building of Chartres Cathedral after the Great Fire was started in 1209.
What is a matter of record is that nine knights – led by Hughes de Payens –occupied the original site of the Temple of Solomon in Jerusalem in 1119. Excavations followed, tunnels, explorations. They appear to have been looking for something. They became known as the Poor Knights of the Temple of Solomon.
And although white people are not recorded to have been seen in Africa until the mid-15th Century, there is a myth in Ethiopia that the impossibly massive obelisk at Axum – it is over 100ft tall, the largest single piece of stone ever quarried in this world – was raised by 'fair-headed' people using the power of the Ark of the Covenant. Were these 'fair-headed' people Knights Templar perhaps?
Disjointed, unconnected facts? Nothing more than a series of coincidences? A desire to see patterns, codes, where none exist? Or the sort of hidden secret history that wriggles further from our grasp the more closely we look?
You decide.
