Where is the Ark of the Covenant? What history and archaeology can say

What is the Ark of the Covenant?

In Exodus 25 the Ark is a chest of acacia wood, two and a half cubits long and one and a half wide and high, which the notes to the New American Bible put at roughly 3¾ by 2¼ by 2¼ feet. It is plated with gold inside and out and carried on gilded poles slid through rings at its corners. Its cover, often translated "mercy seat", carries two golden cherubim, which the same notes describe as forming the throne of the invisible Lord. Inside, according to the biblical accounts, were the tablets of the law, along with a jar of manna and Aaron's rod.

In the biblical story it travels ahead of the Israelites in the wilderness and is later kept at Shiloh. The Philistines capture it in battle and send it back. According to 1 Samuel 7:2 it then stays at Kiriath-jearim for twenty years, until David brings it to Jerusalem; Solomon places it in the innermost room of the Temple, the Holy of Holies. The Book of Chronicles implies it was still there under King Josiah in the late seventh century BCE.

For Jews and Christians the Ark is a sacred object of scripture. Whether a chest like the one in Exodus existed, and where it went, are historical questions, and this file treats them separately from belief.

Where the record stops: 586 BCE

In 586 BCE the Babylonian army of Nebuchadnezzar II destroyed Jerusalem and the Temple. The Bible does not say when or how the Ark disappeared, and no non-biblical source says the Babylonians found it, National Geographic notes. Some scholars place its loss somewhere between Josiah's reign and the fall of the city. The Book of Jeremiah already imagines a time when people will no longer speak of it: "They will no longer think of it, or remember it, or miss it" (Jeremiah 3:16).

Later writings fill the silence with competing answers. Second Maccabees says Jeremiah hid the Ark in a cave on the mountain Moses climbed, usually taken to be Mount Nebo in today's Jordan. The Talmud says Josiah hid it in a chamber Solomon had prepared beneath the Temple. The apocryphal 1 Esdras has the Babylonians carrying off the vessels of the Ark. Others point to the Egyptian king Shishak, whom the Bible says took the Temple's treasures, though Egyptian sources do not mention the Ark. These are traditions and theories, not records.

Has the Ark of the Covenant been found? What archaeology found

The one place where archaeologists have dug specifically in the Ark's story is Kiriath-jearim, identified with the hill of Deir el-ʿAzar above the town of Abu Ghosh, 13 km west-northwest of Jerusalem's Old City. The summit is occupied by the Convent of the Ark of the Covenant and the Church of Our Lady of the Ark, built in 1924. Tel Aviv University and the Collège de France excavated around it for four weeks in August 2017 and again in August 2019, under Israel Finkelstein, Thomas Römer and Christophe Nicolle.

They found a large artificial platform, about 150 by 110 metres, levelling the top of the hill. Dating by optically stimulated luminescence placed it around the eighth century BCE, and the team proposed that the northern kingdom of Israel built it, perhaps as a shrine tied to the Ark tradition. Finkelstein himself does not believe the Ark existed, the Times of Israel reported. The final report, published in 2025, examines the biblical tradition of "the temple of the Ark" at the site. What the dig recovered was a setting for the story, not the Ark.

Popular alternative claims: Aksum and the Lemba drum

The best-known claim is Ethiopian. The Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church holds that the Ark is kept at the Church of Our Lady Mary of Zion in Aksum. The Kebra Nagast, a fourteenth-century Ethiopian text, tells how Menelik, son of Solomon and the Queen of Sheba, brought the real Ark from Jerusalem and left a replica behind. A single guardian is chosen to watch over it for the rest of his life, and requests from outsiders to see it are refused. Every Ethiopian Orthodox church has a tabot that resembles it. Because no outsider has examined the object, there is no way to test its age or nature; the claim belongs to faith, and is respected here as such.

A second claim comes from southern Africa. In 2007 Tudor Parfitt, a professor of modern Jewish studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, found the ngoma lungundu, a sacred drum associated with the Lemba people, in a storeroom of the Harare museum, and in 2008 he published his case that it could be a replica of the Ark. A splinter from it has been carbon-dated to about 1300 CE. Parfitt has called rival explanations wholly plausible, and the Zimbabwean historian Rob Burrett told the Associated Press that ceremonial drums of great power are an integral part of African culture. When the museum put it on display in 2010, its labels set out both theories.

Ark of the Covenant photos, and what is still unsolved

There are no verified Ark of the Covenant photos. The object at Aksum is seen only by its guardian. The drum in Harare, which can be seen, has been dated to around 1300 CE, so even on Parfitt's reading it is a later replica rather than the original. Pictures of the Ark are reconstructions, usually based on the description in Exodus.

The Ark of the Covenant mystery has two layers. One is historical: whether a chest like the one in Exodus stood in Solomon's Temple. The Bible says it did; some archaeologists, Finkelstein among them, doubt it existed; no artefact survives to settle it. The other is where it went, if it was there. Babylon, Egypt, a cave on Mount Nebo, a chamber under the Temple Mount and Aksum have all been proposed, and none has produced physical evidence that outsiders can examine.

Verdict

The Ark of the Covenant explained in brief: a sacred chest described in detail in Exodus, placed in the Temple by Solomon according to the Bible, and absent from every record after 586 BCE. The Aksum tradition is held in faith and closed to inspection, and the Lemba drum dates to the Middle Ages. As of October 2026 no one can show where the Ark is, or confirm that it survives. Real or Legend files the question as unsolved.