Raiding versus Archeology

 Ricca, Brad.  True Raiders: The Untold Story of the 1909 Expedition to Find the Legendary Ark

         of the Covenant.  New York: St. Martin's Press, 2021.

 

These days, Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark is what springs first to mind when people think about the Ark of the Covenant.  But the story of the Ark of the Covenant begins long before 1981.  It goes back into ancient history, recorded in the Pentateuch, specifically Exodus.  The Ark disappears from the record during the time of kings of Judah and no one knows where it is located now.  Many folks have searched for the Ark, True Raiders is the tale of one of those searches.

While True Raiders focuses on the 1909-1911 Parker Expedition to Jerusalem, Brad Ricca includes bits of the the Charles Warren exploration conducted in 1867 and Jacob Vester's discovery in 1880.  In 1908, a Syndicate of British and Swedish businessmen was formed for the purpose of finding the Ark of the Covenant based on a cipher constructed by Valter Juvelius, a Finnish scholar and surveyor.  Monty Parker, a hero in the Second Boer War, was appointed the head of the expedition.  He recruited among others, Cyril Foley, a famous cricketer and a member of the Jameson Raid during the First Boer War.  The Expedition sailed to Palestine in a private yacht, obtained the required permits from the Turkish authorities and commenced digging in the tunnels.  They spent the summer of 1909, the summer and winter of 1910 digging before they were required to leave in 1911 due to rumors that they had infiltrated the Dome of the Rock and dug there.  They managed to clear out the tunnels that connect the Pool of Siloam, but they did not find the Ark.  What they might have found is still a question that was not really answered even when Monty Parkers's private papers were located.

Brad Ricca has written an old-fashioned history for the general public.  True Raiders provides plenty of adventure, intrigue, and twists for the reader to enjoy.  But the multitude of of viewpoints and time shifts can be off-putting to the reader while the first-person narrative seems more suitable for fiction than a history.  Thankfully, Ricca does provide sources for the reader to explore.  If the reader is looking for a quick moving archeological adventure, picking up and perusing True Raiders would be rewarding.