Three thousand years ago, in the holy city of Jerusalem, King Solomon built a magnificent
temple.
In it was said to be the most holy object on earth, the Ark of the Covenant, containing
the Ten Commandments, the very stones God gave Moses on Mount Sinai.
According to the Bible, the Ark had unimaginable supernatural powers.
In ancient times, when anybody came in contact with the contents of the Ark, bad things happened
to them.
But then, mysteriously, the Ark and the stone tablets disappeared without a trace.
What happened to them, and where they might be today, remain among the Bible's greatest
mysteries.
But now, one man thinks he has the answer.
I'm absolutely sure that I know where the contents of the Ark are.
Jerusalem, the heart of the Holy Land, the soul of the Western world.
The Golden Dome of the Rock dominates this sacred city.
It is one of the holiest shrines of Islam.
From here, the Prophet Muhammad is said to have ascended to heaven.
And for thousands of years, many have believed this was also the site of King Solomon's
magnificent temple, the last place on earth the Ark of the Covenant and the stone tablets
were ever seen.
And they shall make an Ark.
With these words, God commanded the children of Israel to build a chest to receive the
Ten Commandments.
And thou shalt put into the Ark the testimony which I shall give thee.
Its awesome powers are the stuff of legend, bolts of lightning and plagues, leveling mountains
and laying waste to entire armies.
The Bible tells us God gave Moses precise specifications for building the Ark.
Its contents, the Ten Commandments, were said to be the only physical object ever to pass
directly from God to man.
From Moses to Solomon, the Ark remained the most sacred symbol of the Jewish faith, while
its great powers led the children of Israel to victory after victory in battle.
And built the first great temple of Jerusalem to house the Ark.
And it was here, in the temple's inner sanctum, the Holy of Holies, that the Ark remained
until it vanished, literally, from the Bible and from all historical record.
Mike Saunders is a biblical scholar who has spent half a lifetime searching for evidence
that events in the Bible can be reconciled with historical fact.
And now, Saunders believes he knows the fate of the lost Ark and God's Ten Commandments
to the children of Israel.
Over thousands of years, there's been endless speculation and theories by archaeologists,
biblical scholars, treasure hunters and crackpots, all claiming to have solved the mystery and
found the Ark.
Perhaps the most intriguing theory involves Solomon himself.
The legend begins with the beautiful and powerful queen of Sheba, ruler of Ethiopia, who journeys
to Jerusalem to meet the king of Israel.
She's heard of his legendary wisdom, and yet, meeting the great king, she is spellbound.
They fall in love.
But it would be a star-crossed romance.
Their passion in conflict with their sovereign duties.
Before she left Ethiopia, Sheba vowed to return to her homeland, to her people and to her
throne, obligation won out over desire.
It is on her journey home that their son Menelech is born.
When Menelech turns 20, Sheba sends him to meet his legendary father.
For Menelech, too, meeting the great king is a revelation.
Even legend proves inadequate to the man who welcomes him so warmly, the father he never
knew.
Menelech is in awe of the great king, and yet, all too soon, he must make the return
journey to Ethiopia as well.
To assure his safety, Jerusalem's temple elders send their firstborn sons as escorts.
It is only once the caravan has journeyed deep into the desert that his guardians reveal
their secret cargo.
Unbeknownst to Menelech, his caravan is carrying the holiest of artifacts, the ark itself.
Convinced it is God's will, Menelech continues the journey to Ethiopia, where many believe
the ark remains to this day, in the church of St. Mary's, in the village of Aksum.
A second prominent theory has a group of renegade Israelites in a religious dispute fleeing
with the ark to Elephantine Island in the Nile, where they build their own temple and
holy of holies.
Two centuries later, a war breaks out between the Israelites on Elephantine and the Egyptians.
The temple is destroyed and the Israelites depart with the ark.
Some say they took it to Ethiopia.
Some say they returned it to Jerusalem.
Some say they did neither.
And still other theories involve legends that harken back to the time of the Crusades, when
knights in shining armor ventured to the Holy Land in the name of Christendom to battle
the Muslim conquerors, known as infidels.
It was the time of King Arthur and the Round Table, of Robin Hood and Richard the Lionheart.
It was also the time of a mysterious and mystical order known as the Knights Templar, who were
said to use the Crusades as a pretense for finding the holy grail and the ark.
One account has the knights marching on Jerusalem in 1119 AD, where it is said they dug under
the Dome of the Rock, but found nothing.
And yet the story is also told another way, that they actually found the holy relic beneath
the Dome of the Rock, transported it back to Europe in total secrecy, and have kept
it hidden deep beneath the Cathedral at Chartres ever since.
Still others say the ark will be found on the Jordanian banks of the Dead Sea, not far
from the location of the Dead Sea Scrolls.
Some actually believe the legend according to Indiana Jones, a snake-filled well of souls
in the Egyptian desert.
Still others believe it was buried under Temple Mount to hide the sacred ark from Israel's
enemies.
A site sacred to three faiths, this would be the battleground between Muslim invaders
and the forces of Christendom on Crusade.
Ron Wyatt, a self-proclaimed archaeologist, claimed to have seen the ark here in 1982,
but died before revealing his evidence.
And now Mike Saunders has a new theory.
He picks up the trail in the Bible itself.
What is quite startling is that there is nothing in the Bible that explicitly says that the
ark disappeared.
It seems to just fade from history, but there are clues and very important clues.
According to the Old Testament, five years after the death of Solomon, an Egyptian pharaoh
known as Shishak invaded the Holy Land and held Jerusalem to ransom.
In return for sparing the city, Shishak demanded all the treasures in the kingdom of Judah.
Shishak comes to the edge of this kingdom with a vast army of 60,000 foot soldiers and
1,200 chariots.
And he sends his emissaries ahead and says, I control totally your country.
I will leave you alone.
Give me all the treasures of your temple and all the treasures of your palace.
According to Saunders, to spare the holy city and to save their lives, the people gave Shishak
everything, including the treasure of Solomon's temple.
And all means all.
It is absolutely certain that Shishak took all the treasures of the temple and all means
the ark of the covenant and the contents of the ark.
If Saunders' interpretation of the Bible is correct, history has been looking for the
ark in all the wrong places.
But if Shishak took everything, including the ark, what did he do with it?
And who was the Egyptian pharaoh the Bible calls Shishak?
If Mike Saunders is correct, if the ark of the covenant was taken from King Solomon's
temple by the pharaoh known in the Bible as Shishak, then Saunders must discover who
Shishak was and what he did with his sacred plunder.
There is only one place to start looking, Cairo.
The world's greatest collection of ancient Egyptian relics is found here in Cairo's
Egyptian museum.
Saunders has come in search of clues.
What would a conquering pharaoh like Shishak have done with the loot from his Israeli campaign?
These small ceremonial stone tablets were discovered beneath the foundations of ancient
Egyptian temples.
In that custom, there could be a clue.
Known as foundation deposits, they might shed light on what Shishak did with the treasure
he took out of Israel.
An expert on foundation deposits is the former director of the museum, Mohammed Saleh.
The foundation deposits are the objects or the artifacts which the ancient Egyptian kings
from the beginning of the history were putting under some places of construction.
Whatever you find in the foundation deposits, you find the names of the kings, who built
or who ordered this building, and the god to whom it was dedicated, and some other information
telling us what kinds of tools and instruments were used in these buildings, in the great
buildings.
They were putting this in special corners.
In the four corners?
In the four corners.
So it was in fact, most of the important buildings had foundation deposits in them, certainly
temples, pyramids, palaces, and shrines for the god or for the king.
Saunders believes Shishak knew the stones from the ark were sacred, and placed them
in the foundation of one of his own temples.
He would have thought that, ah, we've got the shrine of their god, let's take the stones
or whatever is inside that offering and put it in our temple deposit, in our foundation
deposit.
If he did, Saunders believes, these priceless biblical relics, the actual stones God gave
Moses on Mount Sinai, might remain today precisely where Shishak buried them nearly 3,000 years
ago.
The ancient city of Luxor, on the banks of the Nile.
Across the river is the Valley of the Kings, with tombs and monuments of many of Egypt's
greatest pharaohs.
The next stage of Saunders' search is to find out more about the pharaoh referred to in
the Old Testament as Shishak.
Written on these walls are the histories of the pharaohs, but with virtually all the great
Egyptian kings represented here, there is no mention of a pharaoh named Shishak.
In fact, most scholars agree, there never was a pharaoh named Shishak.
Saunders though is undaunted and thinks he's discovered the discrepancy.
Shishak, it turns out, is the Hebrew name given an Egyptian king in the Old Testament.
It's not an Egyptian name at all.
But Saunders must still answer the question, exactly which pharaoh was Shishak?
Here Saunders' theory could rewrite hundreds of years of ancient history.
For centuries it's been believed the pharaoh referred to in the Bible as Shishak was the
22nd dynasty king known as Shoshank.
He too invaded the Holy Land, and many felt the similar sounding names made a strong case.
But Saunders isn't so sure.
Once again the clue he needs would be found in the Bible itself.
In the biblical account of Shishak's campaign, his army invaded only the southern part of
the Kingdom of Judah, leaving the northern territory known as Israel untouched.
All the other Egyptian pharaohs had attacked both north and south.
So we have to look for an Egyptian king who never attacked the north but was powerful
enough to attack the south.
If you go through the list of all the major Egyptian kings who ever left Egypt, you have
Thutmose who invaded the north.
You have Ramesses II who invaded the north.
You have Shoshank who invaded the north.
He did not invade the south.
If you go through all those Egyptian kings, you're left with only one powerful Egyptian
king who only attacked the south, and that is Ramesses III.
It looks as though Ramesses III is Shishak.
Saunders is convinced he has identified the man who invaded the Holy Land and looted Solomon's
temple.
He is now certain that the original raider of the lost ark was the pharaoh Ramesses III.
Today Saunders is about to meet the legendary pharaoh face to face.
Some authorities are intrigued by Saunders' theory that Ramesses III is Shishak and have
agreed to show him something so extraordinary it rarely sees the light of day.
Now we are going to see one of the most famous pharaohs in our history.
So that's Ramesses III.
That's Ramesses III.
He is remarkably well-preserved, isn't he?
Yes, he is in very good condition, as you see.
Do we have any idea how old he might have been when he died from the mummy himself rather
than from the historical record?
Our information is very little about his actual age, but you can say he's around 40 years
from this x-rays and from the thickness of the bones, so the whole body.
If only mummies could speak what a tale they could tell of how that ark was captured.
Meaning the long-dead pharaoh has given new hope to Saunders' quest to find the ark of
the covenant and the holy tablets of stone.
There's no question that the discovery of the stones would be the most profound archaeological
and even political discovery not only of the decade, the century, but the millennium.
If Ramesses III really was Shishak, where might he have stashed the loot?
Could Mike Saunders be one step closer to actually finding the lost ark?
Throughout history, many great leaders in many cultures left magnificent legacies.
Egyptian pharaohs outdid them all.
Mednid Habu, the magnificent mortuary temple of Ramesses III.
Mike Saunders has dared to rewrite centuries of ancient history with the bold hypothesis
that the biblical pharaoh known as Shishak was in fact Ramesses III.
Here Saunders hopes to pick up the trail that will lead him to the great king's most remarkable
plunder, the ark of the covenant and the tablets bearing the Ten Commandments.
Professor Mohammed Saleh has offered to guide Saunders around the site.
Ramesses III was one of ancient Egypt's last great warrior kings.
His 31 year reign saw almost constant invasion and conquest of Egypt's neighboring lands.
Among so many images of spoils from these conquests, one prize seems to stand out above
all the rest.
I'm here in one of the inner chambers of the mortuary temple of Ramesses III and the most
exciting for me and most interesting part is this wall where there is a golden box and
it's being carried on golden poles and above that golden box is a solar representation
with wings and it doesn't take too much of a stretch of the imagination to see that that
golden box was the ark of the covenant carried just as the Bible says on two golden poles
and above it winged cherubim, exactly like the cherubim in the Bible.
According to the Bible, the ark of the covenant was crowned with two winged creatures known
as cherubim.
Saunders believes he's made a major breakthrough.
He claims he's the first to connect these images to Solomon's great temple in Jerusalem
and the ark of the covenant.
There's one here, one here, one over there, further down, extra ones.
This whole chamber seems to somehow be dedicated in representing where Ramesses III obtained
his treasure and obtained the ability to build probably the most magnificent temple in all
of Egypt.
Saunders believes Mednet Habu was built by Ramesses in honor of Solomon and his great
temple at Jerusalem.
He also suggests it's probable the ark itself may have been brought this far, a glorious
golden spoil of war displayed triumphantly and perhaps later melted down for the gold,
but no one really knows.
But what of its divine contents, the tablets God gave Moses on Mount Sinai?
Mednet Habu was built decades after the looting of Jerusalem.
Saunders believes it's unlikely Ramesses would have held on to the holy stones for so long,
then buried them here.
Saunders thinks it's more likely Ramesses would have buried the stones much earlier,
so Saunders must now find one of the pharaoh's monuments built closer to the time he plundered
Jerusalem.
Once again, the ancient records are scoured for fresh clues.
Written by Ramesses's sons, the so-called Harris Papyrus recorded all of the great king's
achievements.
Amid the impressive chronicle, one anomaly has gone virtually unnoticed for millennia.
What stood out to me was the fact that Ramesses III had built a temple outside of Egypt,
which is not a normal occurrence for the Egyptian kings, in a place called Vahi Pakkanon.
And there was another clue.
The papyrus reveals that this unusual temple was built by Ramesses III at the site where
he received a consignment of treasure from the kingdom of Judah.
For the Egyptian king to build a temple outside of his domain, purposefully just to receive
the tribute, it must have been a massive tribute.
According to Saunders, the most likely source of this massive tribute was Jerusalem's sacred
treasure, the contents of Solomon's temple, including the Ark of the Covenant.
With a candidate for the temple identified, Saunders needs to find the modern location
of the temple at Vahi Pakkanon.
Very simply, I had asked my wife to go to the Times Atlas of the world, look in the
index and see if there was any Zahi, D.J.A.H.I. anywhere in the index.
And she comes back to me and she says, well, there is a Zahariya that looks similar, D.J.A.H.I.
Will that do?
I said to her, well, absolutely, let's find out where this place is.
At which point, amazingly, my hairs at the back of my head jumped up because the Zahariya
on the Atlas was exactly the spot where an Egyptian king would stop his armies if he
were marching from Egypt to Jerusalem.
Could this be the breakthrough Saunders has been looking for?
If his theories are correct, then finding this temple could also mean finding the actual
Ten Commandments.
Finding the Ark of the Covenant and the Ten Commandments has haunted man for nearly three
thousand years, from crusading knights to the son of Solomon and Sheba, from Temple
Mount to the Well of Souls, theories abound, but hardcore evidence has always proven elusive.
Is Mike Saunders finally on the trail of the Ark's divine contents?
The temple Ramesses built outside Egypt would be the key.
Zahariya was the natural place for an Egyptian army to camp after crossing the desert, before
the terrain becomes treacherously steep and the army would be vulnerable to attack.
That would also make this town the logical site for Ramesses to build a temple after
his great conquest.
If the temple is there, the foundation deposits of the temple would still be there and the
stones may very well be found in the temple deposits in that village.
But fighting over the Holy Land doesn't just belong to Bible history.
Zahariya is situated on the Middle East's most active political fault mine, the West
Bank.
Control of this area was only recently handed over by Israel to the Palestinian Authority
and satisfying biblical curiosity is not high among Zahariya's priorities.
The Palestinian Ministry of Antiquities and Archaeology has given Saunders permission
for a preliminary survey in Zahariya, but they can't guarantee his safety.
The children still stone cars, we hope they won't stone us, but in any adventure there's
some danger and one has to face that this is much too important a quest to worry about
any dangers that might be there.
There's the sign.
Here we are.
After all this time.
How many people live here now?
About 18,000 people.
It's a bustling little town.
There's a good market here for the Bedouins who are coming from the south.
Everybody comes from the desert, the first place they come to is Zahariya.
So that hasn't changed in 3,000 years.
Saunders search will not be an easy one.
Even assuming he is correct and this is where Rameses built his temple, after thousands
of years it's possible no trace remains of that ancient monument.
But Saunders hunches are adding up.
Evidence suggests Zahariya is the site where Rameses camped and built his temple.
The Egyptian army would come from the south here, build this temple and overlook the whole
of the Hebron Hills as far as the eye can see.
Wonderful place to put a temple.
New evidence, building stones that suggest they come from an important ancient monument.
You can see a lot of this stuff has been reused and it's all from different periods.
Look, you see these holes, here look at how nicely squared off that is, there's one over
there with holes, there's one here with holes, and then there's all this other rubbish.
Look at this, very nice, look the finish on here, it's perfectly shaped, perfectly straight
on the edges, look at all this other stuff that they built ordinary fortresses with,
this is what they used to build fortresses, they spent a lot of time and effort in cutting
that stone, there was a special building here.
Everywhere Saunders looks he finds evidence there was once an important ancient structure
here.
I mean this limpel for example is obviously much older, it was cut a lot earlier and was
broken before it was actually put into place.
I don't think we can yet say that any of the stones are Egyptian, but they're certainly
older than this building.
When he came to Dahariya, Saunders was concerned there'd be nothing left of any ancient buildings.
Now he has the opposite problem with so many ruins and so much rubble.
How will he ever find the foundation of one ancient Egyptian temple?
More than 160 years ago, an American explorer named Edward Robinson passed through Dahariya
and described the ruins of an ancient fortress-like tower.
Could Robinson have seen the last standing remains of Rameses' great temple?
Robinson's tower was said to have one distinctive feature, an enormous, perfectly crafted nine
foot stone.
Finding one particular stone amid so much rubble is next to impossible, but Saunders
finally finds the next best thing, someone who claims to know where it is.
Perhaps he would know where that nine foot long stone is.
We want to know where the biggest stone of all the villages is.
I want to ask you, where is the biggest stone in this ancient building, about three meters
long?
It's called the fortress.
The fortress?
Yes.
Where is the fortress?
It's right here.
What does the fortress mean?
It's like an ancient church.
I want to transfer it now.
He's talking that he thinks that it will be in the fortress.
The fortress means in English fortifications.
He says the number is about 3,000 years ago.
Good.
Now where is it?
We want to go and see it.
Where is it?
He thinks it's over there.
This one is quite large.
It's not enough.
No, it's not enough.
But it's big.
There's a nice large cut stone here, but not nine foot.
We're looking for the nine footer.
You see these came from a different building, look, look at this.
These came from a different building, look, look, here we go, here we go, there it is.
Finding the nine foot stone is an exciting discovery.
It could be the breakthrough that reveals the location of the temple Ramesses built
3,000 years ago.
This wall is absolutely incredible in comparison to the rest of the village.
Everything else has been reused.
Why?
Because it's practical for builders to reuse small blocks of stone.
When you're building a house, when you're building a fortress, you build in normal size
blocks.
It's only when you build something that is dedicated to a God that has some special spiritual
significance that you use something out of the ordinary.
And there there is a nine foot plus block of stone.
Everybody in their right mind would spend time taking that block and putting it in their
house or putting it in a fortress.
And they're obviously in their original position.
Nobody's ever moved them.
They were built specially for this building.
And this is not a fortress.
This is something special.
This is it.
Now, this maybe this was put on later.
This is rubbish.
That's right.
All right.
This is where it was.
Saunders believes he's located part of the original building.
What's more, one of its corners where a foundation deposit would be buried is accessible.
And the wonderful, wonderful, wonderful thing about this is nobody has touched it since
it was built.
Nobody's removed that stone.
If this was built by an Egyptian, there will be a foundation deposit under that.
Could this be the final piece in the puzzle?
Are the sacred stone tablets God gave Moses on Mount Sinai buried here?
Mike Saunders believes he's found the site where the sacred contents of the Ark of the
Covenant are buried.
Though the monument, Ramesses III built to celebrate his great victory over the Israelites.
Now, though, he needs permission from the Palestinian minister for antiquities and archaeology
to dig under the cornerstone.
Time is an approximate commodity in the Middle East.
After a two-hour wait, Saunders is told the minister won't be able to see him for at least
two days.
Saunders uses the delay to revisit Dahria.
With him is Israeli geophysicist Yuri Bassan, who has brought the latest in subsurface radar
scanning technology.
Now they can search for a cavity under the wall without digging.
This bottom corner is where I think a foundation deposit may lie.
So we need your advice and your help.
How do we find out whether there's a cavity below that corner?
We have to clean a little bit, especially to take the metals out of here because the
signal is affected from metals.
It is even good that we have this kind of slope, that this ground is sloping in this
way because we want to look at an angle just underneath the wall.
Yes.
Well, it is perfect.
Let's do it.
No, we are ready.
Oh, I marked the corner.
I will proceed now.
Okay, we'll finish this profile.
Let's go to the point that I think that something is found there.
Sure?
Yeah.
Let's go.
I think this is the location.
You see the turn here, the curvature here.
I see evidence to a strong anomaly, which can be a cavity.
It's located on the 2.3 meters from our start position, which is here.
Just keep in mind that these results are initial and we did not do any sophisticated signal
processing, but still we see major anomaly here.
The radar anomaly could be a cavity, but its location doesn't fit Saunders' theory.
It's a few yards in from the cornerstone where a foundation deposit should be buried,
but Yuri hopes more evidence will turn up when he processes the data more carefully
back in the lab.
Confident there is something to dig for, Saunders returns for his delayed meeting with the
minister.
The minister has stood him up again, but Saunders learns where he has gone and gives chase.
Still no luck.
By the time Saunders arrives at the museum, the minister's already moved on.
Finding the Ark of the Covenant almost seems simple compared with meeting the minister.
Instead Saunders visits Yuri's lab for more detailed results from the radar scan.
Mike, I think I have a little surprise for you.
We found a second anomaly, it looks as if it is a cavity, just underneath the corner.
Under the corner?
Under the corner, yes.
Exactly where they used to put foundation deposits.
This is the anomaly that we saw in the field.
Underneath which was?
Underneath about 2.5 metres at a depth of about 1.5, 1.6 metres, but after I processed
the data at the office, all of a sudden this anomaly came up.
Amazing.
Okay?
And the depth of the anomaly is roughly about 3 metres and it might be a cavity.
Is there any way of determining if there are any objects in that cavity?
Not now, no, it is not possible because it is too deep for this frequency to receive
very detailed information.
At last Saunders meets with the elusive minister for antiquities and archaeology.
Nonsense, stupid buggers.
Where did they find such a law?
We can't do any procedures, procedures, no scanning, no procedures.
We had permission and he said, well, it has nothing to do with the political establishment,
whatever they want, who cares, there is a law, there is an antiquities law, we need
to make an application, we've got to have a scientific institution, we've got to have
financial backing.
All we want to do is dig three inches to find the foundation deposits, they want to make
a big issue.
He is my boss and I can't do nothing.
I have to accept his orders and there is nothing we can do today.
Like so many archaeologists working in this politically charged area, Saunders has hit
a roadblock just when he believes he is on the brink of a breakthrough.
He is certain now that he has made a significant discovery, finding the remains of an important
ancient structure and discovering a tantalizing cavity under one of its corners, suggesting
the wall was built by ancient Egyptians.
If the cavity contains Egyptian foundation deposits, he will have proof of a previously
unknown Egyptian temple built outside Egypt, in itself a major contribution to ancient
history.
I am absolutely convinced that if the two cavities are opened we will find evidence
that Ramesses III built that temple.
Whether the Ten Commandments lie buried here, no one can say, but the trail of clues has
brought him so far and revealed so much, Saunders is determined to gain permission to dig and
prove his theory once and for all.
I can't give up.
We are too close to what could be the most important discovery of our generation.
For now though, Saunders' theory and the name Ramesses III are added to the great tradition
of Ark legends, including King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba, the Crusades of the mysterious
Knights Templar, and so many more.
And yet, if it hasn't been found after all this time, could that be what the God of the
Old Testament wanted for the location of the Ark to remain a mystery forever?
.