The Sign and the Seal

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The Sign and The Seal: The Quest for the Lost Ark of the Covenant (Toronto: Doubleday, ISBN 0-671-86541-2) is a controversial book by Graham Hancock.

The book narrates the endeavours of the writer in searching for the true Ark of the Covenant and proposes the theory that the ark spent several years in Egypt and the Sudan before it came to Ethiopia via the route of Nile river, where it was kept in the islands of Lake Tana for about 400 years and finally taken to Axum. During the war of Ahmed Gragn the ark was taken to Lake Ziway, where it was kept for 40 years, and returned back to Axum.

The theory of The Sign and the Seal differs considerably from the account of its arrival in the country recounted by Ethiopians in the Kebra Nagast.

Hancock based his arguments on claims about the significance of artefacts in Europe and Ethiopia and on certain interpretations of the activities of the Knights Templar, of James Bruce of Scotland, who is supposed to have belonged to a secret order called "the freemasonry". He is not above making the same word in the Bible mean, according as it suits the argument he is advancing at the moment, either a "grove", as in the King James Version, or a "sacred pole" or "Asherah", as in the Jerusalem Bible and other modern translations.

Although the book reads as a detective novel, it follows the set-up of a traditional Grail novel, in which the author's quest is to find the Holy Grail. (Hancock himself says that the Ark of the Covenant is to be regarded as the Grail.) He presents himself as growing, through his travels in France, Egypt, Israel and the Sudan and his research in religion, history and archaeology, into a believer in the Ethiopian claims that the Ark is kept in Axum.