St. Mary of Zion / Alleged Ark of the Covenant

From Wikipedia:

St. Mary of Zion claims to contain the original Ark of the Covenant. Reportedly, the Ark was moved to the Chapel of the Tablet adjacent to the old church because a divine ‘heat’ from the Tablets had cracked the stones of its previous sanctum. Emperor Haile Selassie’s wife, Empress Menen, paid for the construction of the new chapel.^{[citation needed]}

According to tradition, the Ark came to Ethiopia with Menelik I after he visited his father King Solomon. Only the guardian monk may view the Ark,^[10] in accordance with the Biblical accounts of the dangers of doing so for non-Kohanim. This lack of accessibility, and questions about the account as a whole, has led Ethiopians and foreign scholars alike to express doubt about the veracity of the claim.^[11] The guardian monk is appointed for life by his predecessor before the predecessor dies. If the incumbent guardian dies without naming a successor, then the monks of the monastery hold an election to select the new guardian.^{[citation needed]} The guardian then is confined to the chapel of the Ark of the Covenant for the rest of his life, praying before it and offering incense.^[12]

In a 1992 interview, Edward Ullendorff, former Professor of Ethiopian Studies at the University of London, says that he personally examined the ark contained within the church in 1941 while a British army officer. He described the ark as a “Middle- to late-medieval construction [from] when these were fabricated ad hoc.”^[13][14]

Image Credit: JensiS65, CC BY-SA 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons