Robert Mugabe

The professor was convinced that this object, which resembled a damaged, ancient African drum, was in fact the lost Ark of the Covenant. One of the most holy objects in ­existence, the Ark, thought to have dated back to around 1200 BC, is ­described in the Bible as a form of container that once held the tablets on which were inscribed God’s Ten Commandments. Yet sometime around 587 BC, after the Babylonians invaded Jerusalem, the Ark is thought to have vanished. But after decades of exhaustive ­research, Parfitt became convinced that the ordinary looking wooden object in the storeroom of the Musuem of Human Sciences in Harare, Zimbabwe, really was the ­remains of the lost Ark. Last year he published a book detailing his breakthrough and documentaries broadcast around the world heralded the find as one of the greatest archaeological discoveries since the Dead Sea scrolls.

The world’s media soon dubbed the Welsh professor “the British Indiana Jones”. But now, almost a year later, Parfitt is worried. Since the publication of his book and the broadcast of the documentaries, the whereabouts of his intriguing discovery are once again unknown. Parfitt says he has been told by sources close to family members of the autocratic Zimbabwean president Robert ­Mugabe that the object is now in the possession of one of Mugabe’s relations, perhaps even Mugabe himself. “I first got suspicious when I started to hear that several people who had tried to see the Ark, many of them ­respectable academics, had been turned away and the museum was becoming very cagey about it,” he says. “Then a contact of mine who has connections to Mugabe’s extended family told me that people close to Mugabe have taken it.

“I’ve tried to make attempts to confirm it but Zimbabwe being such a difficult and corrupt country has meant I haven’t been able to discover where it has been taken.” The professor’s quest for the Ark began in 1987 when he found himself living with the Lemba tribe in a rural area of central Zimbabwe. They had sparked his interest because they claimed to be descended from the tribes of Israel. Though the Lemba looked African they had many traditions that seemed to have come straight from the Old Testament. They didn’t intermarry with other tribes, circumcised their boys, refused pork and ritually slaughtered animals using a special knife. They also talked about a sacred ­object they had once held but since lost called the ngoma, which they claimed their ancestors had rescued from the great temple in Jerusalem and brought to Africa.

Parfitt was struck by the similarities between the Lemba’s description of the ngoma and the Bible’s description of the Ark of the Covenant. Both were carried on poles and not allowed to touch the ground, both were brought into battle as a way of guaranteeing victory and both were guarded by a priest class, whose male descendants would inherit the guarding role. In the case of the Ark these men were the Levites; those guarding the ngoma were called the Buba. “There also seemed to be significant differences,” says Parfitt. “The Ark was apparently a kind of box or chest while the ngoma was described as a drum, although it was used to carry objects inside it. The Ark was covered in gold but the ngoma was just made of wood.”

There was also no proof that the Lemba really had come out of Israel as they claimed. However, Parfitt grew more and more interested in finding out what really had happened to the Ark. He investigated many of the theories ­associated with its disappearance, ­including one that it had been hidden in the depths of Temple Mount or that it had been removed from Jerusalem before the Babylonians arrived and taken to North Africa, eventually ending up in Ethiopia or the Yemen. But his investigations in the Middle East and North Africa drew a blank. He even travelled to Papua New Guinea in search of the Ark, fruitlessly ­researching claims that another lost tribe of Israel had brought it with them to the Pacific island.

Meanwhile a closer investigation of the books of the Old Testament helped him to become increasingly convinced that there were in fact two Arks. Exodus describes how Moses first ascends Mount Sinai and is given the tablets with the commandments on them. He is described as holding one in each hand when he sees the ­Israelites worshipping the golden calf and destroys them in anger. When Moses goes back to Mount Sinai for a second time, however, God asks him to build an ark of wood to hold the tablets. In Deuteronomy Moses describes how he builds the Ark himself out of Shittim wood, now more commonly known as red acacia, a tree that grows on Mount Sinai. But Exodus suggests that a much more elaborate, golden Ark was built by Bezalel, Moses’s chief architect and craftsman. Parfitt has found other sources in ancient Hebrew Rabbi texts that suggest this more elaborate golden Ark was built later and mostly kept in the Temple, perhaps once the tablets had been transferred into it.