by Graham Hancock
his is a book for all friends of high
adventure. In an amazing narrative, Hancock manages to present a case for
Templars surviving ther persecution by King Philip and having carried the
Ark of the Covenant to safety in Ethiopian backwoods. It is evident from
the first ten pages that this book will make compulsive reading, so do not
pick it up unless you are prepared to finish it in a reasonable time frame.
ancock's main problem is the same
as the Lincoln-Baigent-Leigh trio had: street
credibility. There are far to many coincidences, far too many undocumented
twists of history. Even the first premise is largely a matter of faith: that
there ever was an Ark of the Covenant, it survived through millennia, and
that it is worth carrying up and down Middle East.
am biased in my judgment of such material.
I admit it freely. There is just so much untrue stuff assigned to the Templars
that I always set "Sceptism-mode: ON" when I read such material. My shields
went up in a nanosecond when I opened this book, but I read it still. Hancock
does write an entertaining book in this one, it's just the basic premise
that stretches the imagination just a bit too far.
he basic idea appears to be that the
Templars got hold of the Ark of the Covenant (Indiana Jones, here we come...),
and after many interesting turns of the tale had it deposited in the Ethiopian
city of Aqsa. To back this claim up, Hancock has written an extensive history
of the Ark all the way up to its disappearance. Then he goes on to explain
the Coptic Church of Ethiopia with its religious processions involving the
Ark, put on display on major religious festivals. There are apparently hundreds
of replicas of the original floating about, but the original is jealousy
guarded and kept in one less-than-impressive building in the highlands of
Ethiopia.
he most that the Templars are involved
in all this is that there are documents Hancock claims prove that Templars
traveled far more extensively than usually is agreed. They apparently dug
deep into Africa and the Orient, leaving catered trails of evidence of this.
True, there are churches in Ethiopia, carved out of the rock in the ground
in the shape of the cross patté, and there are fleeting mentions of
knight in papers and documents in various interesting places, but proof?
I don't think so. Yet, if you are into secret religious artefacts, and
conspiracies in general, and Templars doing numerous until now unheard of
deeds, this is a book for you. It will not make you sleep, so it's not a
bedside book, but it should be of interest to many of the visitors of this
site.
