Jeremy swiveled the computer back and tapped the keyboard. “There were two additional points of comparison that struck me when I was looking at the Egyptian material. The first was the association with mountains. We know that Moses was given the Commandments on a mountain, and we’re told that the hiding place of the Ark was to be in a mountaintop cave. Well, Anubis was also known as the mountain god, Tepy-dju-ef, ‘he who is upon his mountain.’ The second point concerns the animal skins. I remembered Pliny’s reference to the gorilla skins brought back by Hanno being hung up for display on his return to Carthage. Looking through the other artifacts found in Tut’s treasury, I saw those two strange gilded sculptures of decapitated animal skins hanging from poles, part of the imuit fetish. That too was associated with the cult of Anubis.”
“Are you suggesting a connection between Tut’s tomb and the gorilla skins?” Costas asked incredulously.
“It’s as Jack was saying, tendrils of influence that spread out from Egypt by way of the Near East, through Canaan and Judah, through the Phoenicians. The imuit fetish may have lost most of its meaning outside Egypt, but the imagery and symbolism could have remained, even a lingering memory of its power, a hint of the fear that Anubis instilled. And there may have been a more practical meaning. Perhaps Hanno had been instructed to set up the skins as a secret message that he had carried out his task, a message to the priests and prophets of Judah who may have retained a memory of Egyptian cult practices from the time of the Exodus.”
“Gorilla skins might not have been quite what they had in mind,” Costas said.
“It probably didn’t matter, so long as they could see them and know they’d been used as a covering for the Ark.”
“And the connection with Ethiopia, with the mountain called the Chariot of Fire?” Costas asked.
“I heard about the Ark when I was in Ethiopia, from the village elders in the mountains,” Rebecca said. “And the Lemba people of South Africa, the Mwenye, claimed that they had the Ark and carried it deep into the mountains, hiding it in a cave. The Lemba called it ngoma lungundu, ‘the voice of God.’”
“It sounds as if you were doing a bit more than relief work on your trip,” Costas said.
“Yep. I’m an archaeologist’s daughter.”
“I remember that story,” Jeremy said. “I went to a seminar in Oxford on the analysis of Lemba Y chromosomes that appeared to reveal a haplogroup similarity among samples from one clan with those of Semitic peoples of the Levant. There was a lot of talk of the lost tribes of Israel, and some pretty wild speculation. It could never have occurred to me at the time, of course, but Semitic DNA could mean Phoenician, not Jewish.”
“Maybe Hanno’s crew at the Cape made friends with the local women,” Costas said. “Might have made a nice change from gorillas. Probably easier to catch.”
“If our bronze plaque was set up in the Lemba homeland at the Cape, isn’t it most likely that they would have safeguarded it?” Rebecca said. “They might have seen Hanno setting it up and making offerings to Ba’al Hammon, something he might have done extravagantly to try to keep the locals from tampering with it.”
“And then they remove it and hide it away when they see it being threatened,” Costas said. “That could have happened two thousand years later, when the next navigators from the Mediterranean arrived at the Cape.”
“You mean Bartolomeu Dias in 1488,” Rebecca said.
“And then someone gets hold of it during the Second World War and conceals it among a consignment of gold on a British merchant ship in 1943,” Costas said.
“Who do we know who was snooping around looking for Jewish antiquities at that time?” Jack said, eyeing Costas.
Costas gave him a grim look. “I can think of one unsavory outfit we’ve come across before.”
Jack stared at the photograph on the screen, his mind still on the ancient past. “We shouldn’t discount a direct connection between Judah and Ethiopia as well,” he said. “Remember, the early Christian kingdom of Axum was founded in the region of Ethiopia, maybe with an earlier Jewish presence. Perhaps some Jews fled south following the conquest of Jerusalem by Nebuchadnezzar, seeking the Promised Land. It might have been too dangerous for them to take the Ark and the other sacred objects from the Temple, with the risk of being apprehended by the Babylonians as they went south through Egypt, or of being waylaid in the lawless desert to the south. Perhaps they were a small number of the hardiest people, tasked with finding a secure place to hide the treasures. And once they had done so, it’s possible that some of them returned and made arrangements for the transport of the Ark by sea, all the way round Africa. What fuels all this speculation is that phrase ‘the appointed place’ in the plaque inscription. It seems clear that the Chariot of Fire was an actual place, and that there might have been a reception party awaiting Hanno.”
“So how do you fit the Lemba people into this scenario?” Rebecca asked.
“Only with more speculation,” Jack replied. “But if Hanno arrived at the Cape with his fleet depleted to only one ship, then he may have had a problem with disease as well as with shipwreck. The Periplus shows that they were making forays inland on the way down the west coast of Africa, and every time they did that, they would have been exposed to potentially fatal new diseases against which they would have had little resistance. You only have to look at the miserable time with disease on board the ships of the early European explorers to imagine the scenario. If Hanno encounters people at the Cape who are tough, friendly, and persuaded that the Phoenicians are some kind of messengers from the gods, then he might have recruited some of them to join him for the final part of the voyage. He would have needed strong men to carry the Ark from the shore into the mountains, for a start. And then once their job was done, they may have left Hanno and his surviving crew to carry on overland to Carthage, and made their own way back south to their homeland.”
“Taking with them the story of having transported the Ark to a cave in the mountains,” Rebecca said.
“And also taking with them some of the Jewish customs that researchers have identified among their beliefs,” Jeremy said. “Perhaps the Jewish refugees who formed the reception at the Chariot of Fire tried to convert them, to keep them in awe of the sacred nature of their mission and to impress on them the need for secrecy.”
Costas leaned forward. “All of this is consistent with the idea of the Ark being in a church in Ethiopia, isn’t it? Search online and that seems to be one of the most common conjectures. Maybe its hiding place in the mountains was revealed at some point in recent history and it was secretly taken there by those who had been entrusted with its safety.”
“It’s exactly the kind of thing that King Theodore of Abyssinia might have done, the one who took on the British in 1868,” Jack said. “Maybe knowledge of the original mountaintop location of the Ark had somehow percolated out, and reached the ears of some of the adventurers in the British expedition against him. There were men like Stanley there, later of Livingstone fame. Maybe there was more to that expedition than meets the eye.”
“You might have the key to that in those nineteenth-century documents you have,” Rebecca said.
Jack stared at her, his mind racing. “That’s one direction I want to go in. The other is to find out what the hell was happening in 1943. There’s a crucial backstory to all this in what happened to Clan Macpherson, and I still need to get to the bottom of that.” He sat upright, checking his watch. “That’s fantastic work, Jeremy. And to Costas, for finding the sherd. Absolutely incredible.”