Word: ark
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When last we saw the lost Ark of the Covenant in action, it had been dug up by Indiana Jones in Egypt and ark-napped by Nazis, whom the Ark proceeded to incinerate amidst a tempest of terrifying apparitions. But according to Tudor Parfitt, a real-life scholar-adventurer, Raiders of the Lost Ark had it wrong, and the Ark is actually nowhere near Egypt. In fact, Parfitt claims he has traced it (or a replacement container for the original Ark), to a dusty bottom shelf in a museum in Harare, Zimbabwe...
...Indiana Jones's creators understood, the Ark is one of the Bible's holiest objects, and also one of its most maddening McGuffins. A wooden box, roughly 4 ft. x 2 ft. x 2.5 ft., perhaps gold-plated and carried on poles inserted into rings, it appears in the Good Book variously as the container for the Ten Commandments (Exodus 25:16: "and thou shalt put into the ark the testimony which I shall give thee"); the very locus of God's earthly presence; and as a divine flamethrower that burns obstacles and also crisps some careless Israelites...
Parfitt, 63, is a professor at the University of London's prestigious School of Oriental and African Studies. His new book, The Lost Ark of the Covenant: Solving the 2,500 Year Mystery of the Fabled Biblical Ark (HarperOne) along with a History Channel special scheduled for March 2 would appear to risk a fine academic reputation on what might be called a shaggy Ark story. But the professor has been right before, and his Ark fixation stems from his greatest coup. In the 1980s Parfitt lived with a Southern African clan called the Lemba, who claimed...
...poured his sarcasm and frustration at the Soviet Union's dead hand on artistic and cultural freedom into giant, busy works built of scrap iron and wooden carvings such as the precarious Pisa Tower - a collection of Jewish figures struggling frantically to keep their balance - or Noah's Ark, a warped bestiary sailing forever in search of dry land...
...complaining or anything,” House resident Catherine “Hoppy” M. Maffione ’08 said. It was “almost funny in its own sort of way.“ And one Winthrop resident even proposed “constructing an ark in the MAC quad” over the House’s e-mail list. “Free admission once it’s built if you bring a pair of animals we don’t have yet,” wrote Alexander N. D’Amour...