So, the idiotic AI on youtube has fed me a series of Nazis chasing mystic items … and I have no doubt that they thought about doing it, but what kept them from just invading the monastery that the Ethiopians claim to have the Arc of the Covenant and taking it? They seemed to have had no issue with looting everything they could take, and then went back with a crowbar for anything nailed down.
I for one have no problem believing that the ark and assorted treasures were looted waaaay back in history, on one triumphal column there are images of some temple items from the sack of Jerusalem so melted down works for me. [And no, the Spear of Longinus is not real, Longinus never existed]
This is a good example of how one needs to be aware that popular assumptions can change over time. This can be difficult enough for humans to spot, but AI is usually much worse.
The Nazis, particularly Himmler and the Ahnenerbe, undertook lots of crazy archaeological investigations. But they were never that interested in the Ark of the Covenant. The idea that they were is mostly down to Raiders of the Lost Ark.
A separate issue is interest in the object at Axum. That has unquestionably long been known to the Ethiopians. But Western awareness of it is mostly the result of Graham Hancock’s 1992 book, The Sign and the Seal. Interestingly, the one Westerner who did claim to have gained access to the ‘Ark’ during WWII was the German-born, Jewish British army officer, Edward Ullendorff. He judged it to be medieval.
There is a very obvious problem with the idea the Nazis would be interested in the arc of the covenant. They were interested in Aryan “mystical” artifacts, from Norse and Germanic cultures. The arc of the covenant is about as non-Aryan as it gets. That is the actual archeological/linguistic sense of the word, the ancient Judean culture spoke Hebrew which is a semitic language, not an “Aryan” one (or an Indo-European one as it’s now known, cos Nazis). Also needless to say it was very non Aryan in the racist pseudo-scientific Nazi meaning of the word.
Note it was the Italian fascists not the Nazis that controlled Ethiopia. Who were obviously allies of the Nazis but at that stage not just the puppets of the Germans. During the invasion of Abyssinia it wasn’t even clear that it was the Italians who were the junior partner in the axis. By the time that was made very clear, the British had already taken Abyssinia back.
I think the main reason no one showed much interest is the idea that a black African church played a major role in the seminal events of Western civilization would have been unpopular, to say the least, among all European powers during the first half of the 20th century, cos racism. That would’ve been even more true among the fascist powers.
The thing about the Ark: why would anyone get the idea that “an army that wields the Ark is undefeatable”? It didn’t do much good against the Philistines, where they lost 30K men. It didn’t do the Philistines any good, either! They had to give it back to the Israelites to save themselves. The they lost Jerusalem. Then they lost the Ark, apparently, forever. Are they tired of all this “winning” yet?
And the Philistines took the ark of God, and brought it from Ebenezer unto Ashdod.
(Skipping ahead to the punchline):
But the hand of the Lord was heavy upon them of Ashdod, and he destroyed them, and smote them with emerods, even Ashdod and the coasts thereof.
The Philistines made off with the Arc. God punished them with hemorrhoids
For the sake of the little Christian schoolkids, the translation has been filtered through the apologists. From Wikipedia:
“Modern scholars have pointed out that the Hebrew term עפלים, apholim, translated “emerods” in the KJV, could also be translated as “tumors”, as is done in the 19th-century Revised Version of the KJV. In the fourth century A.D., Jerome in the Vulgate translated it as “swellings of the secret parts”. It has often been speculated that the “plague of emerods” was actually an outbreak of bubonic plague, and that the “plague of mice” was actually a plague of rats, which are not distinguished from mice in Ancient Hebrew. Other scholars have identified the “plague of emerods” with other medical conditions, such as bilharziasis, or the bites of camel spiders.”
