Page "Ark of the Covenant" Paragraph 42

In his book The Lost Ark of the Covenant ( 2008 ), Parfitt also suggests that the Ark was taken to Arabia following the events depicted in the Second Book of Maccabees, and cites Arabic sources which maintain it was brought in distant times to Yemen.

One Lemba clan, the Buba, which was supposed to have brought the Ark to Africa, have a genetic signature called the Cohen Modal Haplotype.

This suggests a male Semitic link to the Levant.

Lemba tradition maintains that the Ark spent some time in Sena in Yemen.

Later, it was taken across the sea to East Africa and may have been taken inland at the time of the Great Zimbabwe civilization.

According to their oral traditions, some time after the arrival of the Lemba with the Ark, it self-destructed.

Using a core from the original, the Lemba priests constructed a new one.

This replica was discovered in a cave by a Swedish German missionary named Harald von Sicard in the 1940s and eventually found its way to the Museum of Human Science in Harare.