Rumours of life greatly exaggerated

Certain concepts send even the least reputable historian scuttling for cover. The Holy Grail heads the list. The Knights Templar inspire grave suspicion; so do Atlantis and the Round Table. The Ark of the Covenant is up there with the best — or worst — of them.

The Ark was the repository for the two tablets of stone which Moses brought down from the mountain and on which were inscribed the Ten Commandments. To house it Solomon built a temple of stone and cedarwood, olive wood and gold. Today it rests, or so some 25 million Ethiopian Christians believe, in the rather drear church of Maryam Selon — ‘a small, mean building, very ill-kept and full of pigeons’ dung’, the traveller James Bruce described it in the late 18th century — in Aksum, a town now inconsiderable but once the capital of Ethiopia. No one is allowed to see the Ark, let alone its contents, except the guardian of the shrine, who dedicates his life to its preservation and only on his deathbed passes on the responsibility to a successor.