Tudor Parfitt - The Lost Ark of the Covenant - The Remarkable Quest for the Legendary Ark

He looked at me questioningly. I had been dreaming of getting more actively involved in the search for some time. His obsession was becoming my obsession. Now that we had both more or less concluded that the Ark was not in Jerusalem, I was keen to look elsewhere. The thought of setting out on a mission to Egypt was very tempting. But as I stared out at the distant seashore I wondered if I really should embark on what some people would see as a wild goose chase. Did I - a British gentile - really want to go sleuthing round the Eastern Desert in Egypt in search of a Jewish Holy Grail?

‘I’m not sure, Reuven,’ I said. ‘Go to Egypt in search of the Ark? I’ll have to decide first what I want to be, a scholar or an adventurer.’

‘You could, of course, be both,’ he said. ‘Anyway, from what you said and from what I have been hearing, there are many traditions which seem to lead to Egypt. But as you’re thinking it over, perhaps you could bear these in mind.’

He went back into the apartment and returned with a small velvet-covered box, which he placed, gently on the table.

‘Open it,’ he said

There were three very plump diamonds inside.

‘These are for the first stages of the work if you need them,’ he said. ‘Our war chest! And this is just for starters.’

I slid the little box back across the table. I did not want Reuven’s money. Over the following years it was good to know it was there for emergencies but I stubbornly refused to take anything for myself.

‘I am afraid you are not a practical man,’ he replied sighing. ‘And I wonder if you will ever really get anywhere without changing your attitude towards money. Anyway if this does not tempt you, maybe this will.’

He took out a piece of paper, which had been tucked under one of the old leather-bound Hebrew books on the table and passed it to me with a very formal, slightly ironic gesture.

It was just a few lines, written in Hebrew, from a poem by the twelfth-century Spanish Jewish poet Yehuda ha-Levi:

And I shall walk in the paths of the Ark of the Covenant,

Until I taste the dust of its hiding place,

Which is sweeter than honey.

Reuven knew how to touch my Celtic heart. There was an inspiring beauty in these few lines. And what, indeed, could be sweeter than finding something which for millennia had never ceased to excite the imagination of men?

‘W allah , this is the hiding place effendi ! This is where the Ark was put.’

I had no idea what on earth my somewhat dippy and excitable friend Daud Labib was talking about. For the preceding few minutes I had been reflecting on the fact that over the previous year my interest in the Ark had started to take over my life. Indeed it was principally because of the Ark that I now found myself in the spring of 1994 in Cairo, Egypt, having finally succumbed to Reuven’s entreaties to try to find out more about the world’s most sought after artefact. Whatever reservations had constrained me before had been put aside.

There were two main reasons for coming to Egypt. In the first place I wanted to investigate ancient traditions which maintained that the Ark had been brought here long before the destruction of the First Temple. Secondly, I had wanted to try to understand the background of the exodus of the Hebrew slaves from Egypt. Over the previous week I had stood in the shade of the pyramids the Hebrews had helped construct, walked in the fields where they would have collected straw and mud to make their bricks. Whatever the Ark was, and I was still deeply unclear about this, it had started life, at least conceptually, here in the land of the Pharaohs. I had wanted to feel and see and smell the reasons that led to the creation of the Ark.

So far enlightenment had evaded me.

The following day I was going back to England for a stint of library work but when I returned to Egypt I planned to examine various Ark-like artefacts from Ancient Egypt in Cairo’s museums.

My undersized friend was walking in front of me. Gazing down at him I started wondering inconsequentially how it was that his particularly small head could possibly have produced such a disproportionate mass of dandruff: it had settled on the shoulders of his black, synthetic shirt like an ermine stole.

This morning Daud had dragged me out of the archive where I spent most of my time to take me on a tour of his favourite places in Cairo. He was a Copt - a member of the Egyptian Coptic Christian minority - who lived in a suburb of Cairo but who was originally from the southern Egyptian town of Qift which had played an important role in the history of the Copts.

The word ‘Copt’, deriving from the Greek word for Egypt ( Egyptos ), simply means ‘Egyptian’, a point that Copts are not slow to bring to your attention. Their liturgical language, Coptic, is the descendant of the ancient Egyptian language. But no-one speaks Coptic any more - Arabic is the spoken language of the Coptic minority as it is for the rest of the predominantly Muslim populations. The Copts see themselves as the true heirs of the great civilization of ancient Egypt.

Daud was pointing proudly at a nondescript building set back from the dusty road down which we were walking. His dark eyes radiated enthusiasm. ‘The Ark was put here’ he repeated, making a stabbing gesture with his right hand.

Daud was unlike anyone I had ever met in Egypt. A brilliant and scholarly man who was working on a doctorate on ancient Coptic manuscripts, he carried his irritating eccentricity and individuality before him like silken banners.

‘ This is where the Ark was put!’ Daud bellowed, pointing to a plaque on the wall which proclaimed that this was the Ben Ezra synagogue.

I knew of nothing which connected the Ark with the Ben Ezra synagogue. This synagogue is world-famous because of the discovery in one of its storerooms of the world’s most important collections of medieval documents. I was planning to see what this archive - the Cairo Genizah - had to say about the Ark, if anything. But that would not be here or now, as the documents had been removed to western university libraries in the nineteenth century. But there was absolutely nothing as far as I knew to suggest that the Ark had ever been hidden here.

‘What are you going on about, you excitable little Copt? How do you mean the Ark? Nobody’s ever said the Ark had anything to do with this place.’

In fact I was more than a little mystified. I’d certainly not mentioned my interest in the Ark to Daud. We were close friends and in the past had shared confidences but once, in an unguarded and inebriated moment, he had boasted about carrying out jobs for the Egyptian Mubahath al-Dawla (the General Directorate of State Security Investigations), and since then I had been a little careful about what I told him. In Egypt, the Ark with all its political and religious ramifications, was not a subject to bandy around with the likes of Daud. How could he possibly know about my involvement? I felt an unpleasant clamminess at the base of my spine. I looked at him questioningly.

‘You know, ya achi , Musa’s basket when he was hidden in the reeds: “the Ark of bulrushes”.’

He began to recite by heart in a monotonous chant, which he accompanied with a rhythmic movement of his hand as if he were swinging a censer:

‘And Pharaoh charged all his people, saying, every son that is born ye shall cast into the river, and every daughter ye shall save alive. And there went a man of the house of Levi, and took to wife a daughter of Levi. And the woman conceived, and bare a son: and when she saw that he was a goodly child, she hid him three months. And when she could no longer hide him, she took for him an ark of bulrushes, and daubed it with slime and with pitch, and put the child therein; and she laid it in the reeds by the river’s brink.’