The Silence of Scholars – Why Academia Won’t Touch Ethiopia’s Ark Claim

In 1941, during the East African Campaign, a British army officer named Edward Ullendorff was granted a rare opportunity. Stationed in Axum, Ethiopia, he was shown an object that the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church claimed was the biblical Ark of the Covenant. His assessment was swift and dismissive: a “Middle-to-late-medieval construction”. That single opinion, formed from a brief viewing under wartime conditions, became a cornerstone of the modern academic consensus. It provided scholarly justification for dismissing Ethiopia’s claim to house one of history’s most significant religious artefacts.

This investigation isn’t about finding the Ark of the Covenant. It’s about investigating a conspicuous silence. The Ethiopian Orthodox Church makes a claim of immense historical and religious importance, yet the mainstream academic world has largely responded with dismissal or avoidance.

The mystery isn’t the Ark… It’s the institutional quiet.

A Tale of Two Realities

The split couldn’t be starker. On one side, you have the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church, whose position hasn’t wavered. The Ark arrived in Ethiopia with Menelik I, son of King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba, around the 10th century BC. It’s been in Axum ever since. This isn’t some fringe belief. It’s the cornerstone of Ethiopian Christian identity, written into their national epic, the Kebra Nagast (“The Glory of Kings”).

Former Patriarch Abuna Paulos put it bluntly:

‘It’s no claim, it’s the truth… We don’t have to prove it to anyone.’
— Former Patriarch Abuna Paulos

Even he, as head of the church, was forbidden from seeing it. Only one guardian monk has that privilege, dedicating his entire life to protecting the Ark in complete isolation.

On the other side, Western academia has built a wall of scepticism. Richard Pankhurst dated the Kebra Nagast to the 14th century AD, placing its composition more than two thousand years after the events it describes. Stuart Munro-Hay, after extensive research, concluded that the object in Axum is likely a tabot, a consecrated altar slab found in every Ethiopian Orthodox church, not the biblical Ark.

The academic consensus? The whole thing’s a medieval invention designed to legitimise Ethiopia’s Solomonic dynasty. Nothing to see here. Move along.

But that consensus deserves scrutiny. Not because the Ethiopian claim is necessarily true, but because of how comprehensively the academic world has avoided seriously investigating it.

Measuring the Silence

To understand the scale of this academic cold shoulder, compare it to how scholars treat other religious artefacts.

Take the Turin Shroud. That piece of linen has been poked, prodded, carbon-dated, and analysed by everyone from NASA scientists to amateur photographers. In 1978, the Shroud of Turin Research Project brought together physicists, chemists, and forensic specialists for the most comprehensive scientific examination of any religious artefact in history. Three separate laboratories carbon-dated samples in 1988. The debates continue today, with new theories and analyses published regularly.

Or consider the Dead Sea Scrolls. Their discovery in 1947 triggered what can only be called an academic gold rush. The National Endowment for the Humanities poured money into translation projects. International teams of scholars have spent entire careers parsing every fragment. Thousands of books and articles have been published. Entire conferences are dedicated to their study.

Now look at the Ethiopian Ark claim. Where are the research teams? Where are the conferences? Where are the funded expeditions?

They don’t exist.

The disparity is striking. Yes, the Ethiopian Church restricts access to the object itself. But that hasn’t stopped intense academic interest in other restricted sites. The Temple Mount in Jerusalem is virtually off-limits for archaeological excavation, yet it generates endless scholarly debate and research using remote sensing, historical analysis, and comparative studies.

The Access Excuse – A Convenient Barrier?

The standard explanation runs like this: the Ethiopian Orthodox Church won’t let anyone examine the Ark, so there’s nothing to study. Only the guardian monk can see it. End of story.

It’s a neat excuse. Too neat.

First, the access restriction doesn’t explain why scholars haven’t rigorously investigated the claim itself – its textual history, its social function, its political implications. You don’t need to see the Ark to study why millions of Ethiopians believe in it, how that belief has shaped their culture, or what historical events might have inspired the tradition.

Second, other sites with extreme access restrictions still generate academic interest. Researchers write entire books about places they can’t physically access. They use satellite imagery, study historical records, interview locals, and analyse traditions. The methodology exists. It’s just not being applied to Axum.

The access issue is real, but it’s not the whole story. It’s starting to look more like a convenient reason to avoid a difficult question.

Follow the Money

Academic research follows funding, and funding reveals priorities. So, where does the money go?

Biblical archaeology funding flows overwhelmingly towards the Middle East. The National Endowment for the Humanities supports Dead Sea Scrolls research. The Schweich Lectures on Biblical Archaeology, established in 1907, focuses almost exclusively on the Near East. National Geographic funds excavations at Tel Kabri in Canaan.

Ethiopia? The funding that does exist goes to paleoanthropology (the search for early human fossils) or general cultural heritage projects. But specific funding for investigating the Ark claim? It’s conspicuously absent.

This absence could mean several things. Maybe researchers aren’t submitting proposals, knowing they’ll be rejected. Perhaps the proposals are being quietly turned down. Or funding bodies may have decided the topic doesn’t align with their priorities.

The conference circuit tells a similar story. The American Schools of Oriental Research (ASOR) and the Society of Biblical Literature (SBL) hold regular meetings on biblical archaeology. Ethiopian studies do feature, but when they do, it’s usually about manuscripts or linguistic analysis. Dedicated sessions on the archaeological investigation of the Ark claim? They don’t exist.

Even the International Conference of Ethiopian Studies treats the Ark as a cultural phenomenon to be noted in passing, not a historical claim to be investigated. The Kebra Nagast gets discussed as literature. The actual claim that Axum houses the Ark? That’s politely ignored.

The numbers tell the story. A review of major archaeological and biblical studies journals reveals a distinct lack of focused research on the Ethiopian Ark claim. Where funding flows, research follows. Where it doesn’t, silence reigns.

Is Western Academia Blinded by Bias?

Here’s an uncomfortable possibility… maybe the silence reflects deeper prejudices about whose history matters.
Western scholarship has an ugly track record when it comes to Africa. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, European academics routinely denied African achievements.

The “Hamitic hypothesis” claimed that any significant African accomplishment must have come from lighter-skinned outsiders. When Great Zimbabwe’s ruins proved too sophisticated to fit this narrative, academics invented phantom Phoenician builders rather than credit indigenous Africans.

That explicit racism is supposedly behind us. But implicit biases can persist. In 2020, Ethiopian scholar Yirga Gelaw Woldeyes accused Western translators of performing a “colonial rewrite” of an Ethiopian religious text, ignoring local expertise and imposing foreign interpretations. The patterns haven’t entirely disappeared; they’ve just become subtler.

Western translators performed a “colonial rewrite” of an Ethiopian religious text, ignoring local expertise and imposing foreign interpretive lenses.

– Summary of critique by Yirga Gelaw Woldeyes

Consider how biblical archaeology prioritises geography. The “Holy Land”, modern Israel and Palestine, receives the vast majority of funding and attention. Ethiopia’s biblical connections, including multiple Old Testament references to the ancient kingdom of Kush, are overlooked. An African claim to house Christianity’s most sacred object? That might trigger every unconscious bias about whose religious traditions deserve serious investigation.

The parallel with Sámi archaeology in Scandinavia is instructive. For decades, Sámi prehistory was marginalised by national archaeological establishments in Sweden, Norway, and Finland. Their history was treated as a footnote to “real” Scandinavian history. Only when Sámi scholars gained positions in universities did this begin to change.

Ethiopian scholars face similar challenges. When they engage with Western academia, they often find their perspectives dismissed or reinterpreted through Western frameworks. If the Ark claim doesn’t fit the established narrative of biblical history centred on Jerusalem, it’s easier to ignore it than to reconsider the narrative.

A Tangle of Authorities – Who Believes What

The complexity deepens when you map out who claims what about the Ark. The disagreements between religious authorities alone would give anyone a headache.

The Ethiopian Orthodox Church states categorically that they have the Ark. It arrived with Menelik I around 950 BC and hasn’t moved since.

The Catholic Church points to the Second Book of Maccabees, which says the prophet Jeremiah hid the Ark in a cave on Mount Nebo before the Babylonian exile. Its location will remain unknown until God gathers his people again.

Jewish tradition generally holds that the Ark was hidden beneath the Temple Mount in Jerusalem before the Babylonian conquest. Some rabbis have called the Ethiopian claim “ridiculous.”

Protestant scholars tend to treat the whole question as historically unanswerable, noting that the Kebra Nagast dates from the 14th century and the last biblical mention of the Ark is from the 7th century BC.

Each tradition has theological reasons for its position. But notice something: only one of these traditions claims to know exactly where the Ark is right now. Only one says, “It’s here, we’re guarding it, we’ve always had it.” And that’s the one tradition academic archaeology has decided isn’t worth investigating.

Government positions add another layer.

The Ethiopian government protects Axum as a UNESCO World Heritage site but doesn’t fund archaeological investigation of the Ark claim. They defer to the Church’s authority over the chapel. Israel focuses its Ark-related interests on the Temple Mount.

Here’s where it gets particularly strange.

While academia dismisses the claim, state-level intelligence agencies have shown a different level of interest. Declassified CIA documents from 1988 confirm that the US government used remote viewing, a highly unconventional psychic technique, to try to locate the Ark. The fact that an intelligence agency took the claim seriously enough to deploy assets, no matter how strange, sits in stark contrast to the academic world’s collective shrug.

The Unanswered Questions

After tracking the evidence and the silence surrounding it, we’re left with questions that cut to the heart of how academic knowledge is produced and controlled.

What is actually in the Chapel of the Tablet in Axum? Without access, we can’t know. But that’s just the most obvious question. The deeper ones are perhaps more troubling.

Why has there been no sustained effort to negotiate research access, even using non-invasive techniques? Modern archaeology has ground-penetrating radar, electromagnetic surveys, and other tools that could investigate the chapel’s structure without disturbing the sacred space. Why haven’t these been proposed or attempted?

What do the sealed diplomatic archives contain? We know from one declassified CIA document that the US government took the claim seriously enough to investigate. What other governmental assessments exist? What discussions have taken place between Ethiopia, Israel, the Vatican, and major Western powers about this claim?

Why is there such a disconnect between how intelligence agencies and academic institutions treat the claim? If the CIA thought it worth investigating, however unconventionally, why do universities and research institutions act as if it doesn’t exist?

What role do Ethiopian scholars and church authorities play in perpetuating the silence? The Ethiopian Orthodox Church’s refusal to allow access is understandable from a faith perspective. But are there internal church records, oral traditions, or historical documents that could shed light on the claim’s origins without requiring access to the object itself?

Most crucially… what does this silence tell us about how academic consensus is formed and maintained? The Ethiopian Ark claim isn’t being disproven by scholarly investigation. It’s being ignored. That’s a very different thing, and it raises uncomfortable questions about what other historical claims might be sitting in similar academic blind spots.

The Pattern of Avoidance

The silence of scholars regarding Ethiopia’s Ark of the Covenant claim reveals as much about the politics of knowledge as it does about the Ark itself. Whether the object in Axum is the biblical Ark, a medieval replica, or something else entirely remains unknown. But the pattern of academic avoidance is clear.

This isn’t how scholarship is supposed to work. Claims of historical significance deserve investigation, not dismissal by default. Difficult questions merit engagement, not silence. And traditions that don’t fit Western academic frameworks still deserve respectful, rigorous analysis.

The investigation into academic silence around Ethiopia’s Ark claim reveals systematic patterns of institutional avoidance that extend beyond simple access restrictions. Whether rooted in colonial biases, funding priorities, or political sensitivities, the phenomenon raises questions about how academic institutions decide which historical claims deserve serious investigation.

The Ark stays in its chapel, seen only by its guardian. That’s a fact. But the reasons for academia’s silence are out in the open, scattered through funding reports and conference schedules. The evidence is there. It’s just waiting for investigators who aren’t afraid to read it.

Sources

Sources include: Declassified CIA documents on remote viewing operations (1988); Edward Ullendorff’s eyewitness accounts and scholarly works on Ethiopia (1940s-1990s); the Kebra Nagast and related Ethiopian Orthodox texts; archaeological reports from David Phillipson, Rodolfo Fattovich, and Stuart Munro-Hay on Aksumite civilization; UNESCO World Heritage documentation for Aksum; National Endowment for the Humanities funding records for biblical archaeology; proceedings from the Society of Biblical Literature and International Conference of Ethiopian Studies; critiques of Western Ethiopian scholarship by Yirga Gelaw Woldeyes (2020); and comparative analyses of academic treatment of religious artifacts including the Dead Sea Scrolls and Turin Shroud research projects.