I love crackpot theories. They're like...crack.

[ellid]

Just finished watching an enjoyable, smoothly made, plausibly argued, and (IMNSHO) gently lunatic documentary purporting to prove that the Ark of the Covenant was smuggled out of Jerusalem ahead of the Babylonians, kept in Yemen for several centuries, and finally ended up in the hands of the African tribe known as the Lemba. The Lemba have strong genetic ties to the Jews and may be descended from Yemeni Jewish tribes, and the film argued that the Lemba war drum and sacred object, the Ngoma Lungundu, was a dim memory of the Ark at several removes.

Very interesting, and an entertaining way to spend a couple of hours. True? Almost certainly not. But it's certainly better than ancient astronauts, Jesus as the founder of the Merovingians, and Leonardo Da Vinci building flying machines in the service of the Priory of Sion....

Comments

[kamion.livejournal.com]

Was this one of those Bauval doucemteries?
He has a high degree of lookalike believablilty.... with the accent on look a like, because he covers up the huges gaps in his theories very skilled.
Another theory is that the Ark was taken to Egypt and the center of the religion of the Jewish mercenairies in the soth of Egypt. Also there was a Temple rival to the one in Jerusalem at the island of Elephantine.
Other idea's launched by Bauval is that the Gizah pyramids are a picture of the constellation of Orion, he only neglects to mention that his shown evidence is mirrored left to right and up to down.
Crackpot or charlatan?
When he came up with the theory that the Gizeh Sphinx was a monument mirroring and directed to the constellation of Leo, it became clear that it is charlatan. The Egyptians got the idea that Leo looked like a lion from the Hellenistic Greeks, and certainly saw something different in it about 14.500 years before the first piramids were build.

Crackpot theories can be entertaining, but they are also very annoying

crackpot or charlatan?

[ellid.livejournal.com]

Nope, it was Tudor Profitt. He's a legitimate academic, best known for spearheading the effort to DNA test the Lemba to see if there was any truth to their claim that they were one of the Lost Tribes of Israel. He turned out to be right about the connection, but this is heading toward obsession....

[zephre.livejournal.com]

Sounds just like the plot of Kushiel's Avatar!
;)

[patrikia.livejournal.com]

I've been cutt off of the Naked Archaeologist for yelling and throwing things at the TV screen.




:-)

[ellid.livejournal.com]

I saw that show for the first time this weekend. To say that I was unimpressed is a gross understatement.