The Ark of the Covenant is in Aksum.
The church holds that the original Ark, taken from Jerusalem by Menelik, son of Solomon and the queen of Sheba, rests in the chapel beside the church of Our Lady Mary of Zion. One monk guards it and never leaves the enclosure; no one else, including the patriarch, may see it. Every church in Ethiopia keeps a tabot, a consecrated replica of its tablets, and it is the tabot rather than the building that makes a church a church.
No outside investigator has been permitted to examine the object at Aksum, and no Ethiopian Orthodox authority has ever offered to allow it. Historians generally treat the Kebra Nagast tradition as a fourteenth-century dynastic charter rather than a record of the tenth century BC. Inside the church the claim is not marginal or folkloric — it is structural, because the tabot in every parish derives its meaning from the original it copies. In 2020 the guardian monk's chapel was reported to be within a conflict zone during the Tigray war, and the church appealed publicly for its protection.
The same ground, other faiths
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