Blue Cord

The BBC is reporting that a new study demonstrates that the two best known examples of crystal skulls — one at the Smithsonian and the other at the British Museum — are modern forgeries. The study, published in the Journal of Archaeological Science, found that the skulls were made using tools and abrasives that did not come into usage until the 19th or 20th century. The study did not examine all twelve known skulls, but the findings cast doubt on their authenticity.

Of course, this is not the first study that has shown the skulls to be fakes. Previous studies have also found that several of the skulls were carved using modern rotary tools. And despite claims to the contrary, there are no legends concerning mystical skulls with magic powers in any pre-Columbian Mesoamerican culture.

Archaeology magazine also has an online article by Jane MacLaren Walsh. Walsh has spent years studying the skulls and tracing the dissemination of these fakes to different museums around the world. She has outlined several generations of the forgeries and can trace their points of origin and how they were acquired by different collectors.

And lest we forget that this is all about Indian Jones, Walsh’s article contains this tidbit of trivia: Remember the idol that Jones finds at the beginning of Raiders of the Lost Ark? It was based on a supposed Aztec statue of a goddess. Walsh has examined the original goddess statue and found that it is a 19th century fake as well.

Of course, we can’t blame Indy for all of this. After all, electron microscopes were not in widespread use back in his day.

Apparently there is a new movie coming out called Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. I know this because it has been advertised on every billboard, TV channel, cereal box, and Burger King glass I have seen lately.¹ Cable channels are also jumping in by running Indiana Jones marathons constantly or “documentaries” that explore some of the artifacts from the films. Don’t get me wrong, I am very excited about the fourth Indiana Jones film. I only hope it can live up to its advertising.

In the spirit of things, I thought I would get in on all the hype. After all, I love a good bandwagon. So, here is a link to a long lost letter sent to Dr. Jones explaining why he was denied tenure at Marshall College.

1. Yes, I know the Burget King tie-ins are actually kids toys, but I really miss the days when Burger King gave out actual drinking glasses with movie characters on them. [back]

An article in this week’s Time entitled “A Lead on the Ark of the Covenant” reports that Tudor Parfitt claims to have found the ark of the covenant (or at least its replacement). Now as any good scholar knows, the ark was found back during World War II by Dr. Henry Jones, Jr., and now resides in a warehouse somewhere in Washington, DC. But according to Parfitt, the ark is actually in Zimbabwe.

As with any decent story related to the Bible, Time exhibites a good deal of ignorance concerning scholarship. In the second paragraph, they include this summary of scholarship:

Scholars debate [the ark of the covenant’s] current locale (if any): under the Sphinx? Beneath Jerusalem’s Temple Mount (or, to Muslims, the Noble Sanctuary)? In France? Near London’s Temple tube station?

No serious scholar I know has ever put forth any of these theories. It is only amateurs and treasure hunters with more imagination than evidence who support such ideas. Yet Parfitt cannot be classed with such dilettantes. In the 1980s, he isolated a link between the priestly lineage of the Jews and a tribe called the Lemba in Africa. The Lemba claimed to be a lost tribe of Israel, and genetic evidence suggests that there just may be a connection.

Parfitt claims that the ark of the covenant is somehow connected to a drum-like object called the ngoma lungundu that the Lemba have. The article lists a number of similarities between the ngoma and the ark, including the facts that both are holy, both are carried on poles, and both emit fire against God’s enemies.¹ The main problem, however, is that the article he found does not match biblical descriptions of the ark.

What he has found is a drum. It was a drum that was sometimes used to carry sacred object, but still a musical instrument. And this is a far cry from the ark. The ark is never mentioned as having any musical qualities.² He also notes that this drum was used as a type of cannon. But the ark of the covenant is never depicted as a weapon. It goes before the people in battle, but as a way of invoking God as the divine warrior. The ark is the throne of God, so taking it into battle means that God goes into battle with you as it clearly states in 1 Samuel 4:1-4. And in the only two battles in which the ark is mentioned — Joshua 6 and 1 Samuel 4 — the ark is not physically taken into the battle. At Jericho, the priests carry it around the city, while in the battle at Ebenezer the ark is in the Israelite camp.

In addition, the ngoma found by Parfitt is carbon-dated to 1350 CE. And Lemba ledged asserts that 400 years ago the ngoma destroyed itself and had to be rebuilt. Yet Parfitt persists. He states:

There can be little doubt that what I found is the last thing on earth in direct descent from the Ark of Moses.

He is right — there can be little doubt. What there can be is huge amounts of doubt. It takes assumption after assumption and leap after leap to arrive at the conclusion Parfitt reaches. The artifact he describes has only superficial connections with the ark of the covenant. Perhaps the Lemba are a branch of the tribe of Levi, and perhaps they built their own type of ark after fleeing from Jerusalem in 587 BCE. But the ngoma has so few similarities to the ark of the covenant that it is untenable to think that this tribe possessed the ark of the covenant at any point in their history.

A quick search of the Internet shows that ngoma drums are common in southern Africa. According to the Mukondeni Art Gallery in South Africa:

This drum, when beaten with a human hand, caused enemy armies to fall dead at the sound of its mighty voice. At present all royal houses, as well as the homes of the more junior chiefs still possess one or more Ngoma drums.

The Mukondeni Art Gallery even has a picture of a ngoma lugundu on their site. While the article in Time seems to suggest that Parfitt has discovered a one-of-a-kind artifact, ngoma are in fact rather common. The reason that the Lemba have such a drum is that they are a part of southern African culture. The similarities to the ark of the covenant can be explained more easily by positing a sociological coincidence than by assuming a historical connection with the ark found in the Bible.

Parfitt has a forthcoming book on this subject entitled The Lost Ark of the Covenant: Solving the 2,500 Year Mystery of the Fabled Biblical Ark. It will be available this coming Tuesday (February 26th). The History Channel will be also airing a special based in part on Parfitt’s work. The show, called The Quest for the Lost Ark, first airs on March 2.

1. It should be noted that nowhere in the Bible does it claim that the ark shot out fire in battle. That part of the story comes from oral tradition. [back]
2. Parfitt notes that David danced before the ark and the ark is frequently associated with trumpets, but neither of those are evidence that the ark itself is a musical instrument. [back]

Newsweek has a good on-line article entitled “Mess O’Potamian Art” (presumably with a hat tip to The Daily Show). It provides an update on the Baghdad Museum in the wake of the looting that followed the US invasion five years ago. It also briefly discusses a few new sites that have been explored since the invasion, including one that yielded a previously unknown deity named Shuda, who is mentioned on a stone relief. Unfortunately, the article does not say whether the relief was inscribed with Sumerian, Akkadian, or Aramaic, nor does it give the date of the relief.

Hat tip:  Claude Mariottini for noticing the reference to Shuda.

The Jerusalem Post reported last Wednesday that Eilat Mazar has found a new seal in Jerusalem. She dates the seal to 538–445. Although the Post does not explain her reasons for this date, it is presumably based on the stratum in which the seal was found.

Mazar reads the name on the inscription as Temech and connects it with a family mentioned in Nehemiah 7:55. But as several others have pointed out, she is reading the inscription backwards. Seal engravers normally wrote in mirror image, because they wanted the seal to leave a positive image when pressed into clay. A more likely reading is Shelomith, a name found in Ezra 8:10. Of course, the fact that both names appear in the Bible tell us nothing about the seal except that it contains a known name. There is no reason that the person on the seal has to be someone mentioned in the Bible.

Even if it is someone named in the Bible, Mazar overstates the importance of this find. She says,

The seal of the Temech family gives us a direct connection between archaeology and the biblical sources and serves as actual evidence of a family mentioned in the Bible. . . . One cannot help being astonished by the credibility of the biblical source as seen by the archaeological find.

This seal does nothing to establish the credibility of the Bible. Even if it shows that the Shelomith in Ezra 8:10 (or the Temech in Nehemiah 7:55) were actual people, this is not exactly something that anyone has doubted. But just because the Bible is accurate with regards to post–exilic names does not mean that it is accurate in other respects. One would have thought that by now we would have moved away from trying to “prove” the Bible through archaeology. After all, the biblical archaoelogy movement ended a couple of decades ago.

For fuller discussions of the seal, please see Chris Heard’s post at Higgaion and Jim West’s discussion on his eponymous blog.