Axum and the Ark of the Covenant

The Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church holds that the Ark of the Covenant is here, in the Chapel of the Tablet beside the Church of Our Lady Mary of Zion, and that it came to Ethiopia with Menelik I, son of Solomon and the Queen of Sheba. One man may look at it: a guardian monk, appointed for life by the monk before him. Nobody else, ever. Women may not enter the Old Church at all, because the Virgin Mary is understood as the Ark’s archetype. The scholar Edward Ullendorff said in 1992 that he had examined the object in 1941 and found it empty and of middle to late medieval construction. The church itself is old and real: first built in the fourth century under Ezana, the first Christian king of Axum, destroyed in the sixteenth, rebuilt in Gondarine style by Emperor Fasilides, with the modern basilica added under Haile Selassie by 1964. Know before you go that around 750 people sheltering here were reportedly killed in December 2020 during the Tigray war, and that the government has blocked independent investigation since.