Readers of the Lost Ark

Over the weekend I wrapped up one of my books on the summer reading list: Kevin McGeough’s Readers of the Lost Ark (Oxford 2025). The book considers the various treatments that the Ark of the Covenant receives in Ancient, Medieval and Modern texts from Hebrew Scriptures to Raiders of the Lost Ark and in the hands of various pseudoarchaeologists. The book is intended for the general public and McGeough do es a nice job weaving his person story — particularly his fascination with the Indiana Jones films — into his study of the Ark. This allows the author to “wear his learning lightly” (and anyone familiar with Kevin’s other works appreciates that this learning is significant!).

The book is a wealth of details and encounters with the Ark of the Covenant which I appreciated to varying degrees. My own interest tends toward the Early Christian, Byzantine, and more modern period and I enjoyed McGeough’s attention to some of these areas. Instead of a formal review, here are a few thoughts about the book (directly largely by my own interests!).

1. The Ark as Metasymbol. McGeough sees the Ark’s fluidity in ancient texts and the lacunae in its history as making it a suitable ancient artifact for later authors to transform to suit their own needs. In the Early Christian period, the Ark emerged as a symbol for the Virgin who carried within her God as well as for Christ as the incarnation of the Word. In the Modern period, the Ark served as a kind of McGuffin in various stories that ranged from social commentary on mid-century mores to a Nazified Cold War allegory. The comparison of the Ark to the swastika is a nice touch especially as the Ark seems nearly inseparable (even in narratives tinged with supersessionism) from Judaism and Jewish claims to power. 

2. The Ark and Ethiopia. I had understood the importance of the role of the Ark of the Covenant in Ethiopian Christianity, but had never bothered to piece together its historical and contemporary roles in their practices. Kevin’s book does that nice and I only wished he carried the place of the Ark forward to its place within Rastafarianism. This is very minor sin of omission, though, but it would set the stage for the various appearances of the Ark in North America. I’ve long wondered how the Ark arrived in the US and whether it had a role within emerging African American conceptions of Black identity. In particular, I wondered whether the Ark formed part of Black desires both to  look toward Ethiopia as a spiritual (and possibly literal) homeland and to recognize the mystical and symbolic presence within various readings of Egypt, Moses, and the Exodus (and here I’m thinking of Zora Neale Hurston’s Moses Man of the Mountain). Of course, this is hardly a critique as much as a simply saying that Kevin and my interests differ.

3. Ark and Agency. It is pretty typical now for us to recognize the distinct form of agency present in things. This is often introduced as part a larger conversation about ontology and as a way to demonstrate that a more expansive notion of agency helps us understand causality and context in different ways. In particular, understanding the agency of things has helped us articulate the limits (or affordances) of human choices and actions. The Ark offers a powerful example of an explicitly agential thing. The Ark had such power that even touching it could cause death and enemies who captured it returned it rather than face its wrath. Such an explicit example of agential power makes clear that there is a tradition of “thing power” close to the core of the Judeo-Christian tradition. The power of the Ark — especially as an “empty symbol” — allowed it to become an exemplar for the power of things in the 21st century.     

4. The Ark and Pseudoarchaeology. I was particularly drawn to McGeough’s treatment of the Ark and pseudoarchaeology. The same mysterious character of the Ark that gave it such power in various narratives has also given it power in the pseudoarchaeological imagination. It is remarkable that pseudoarchaeology relies so heavily on such metasymbols or empty symbols. Atlantis or Stonehenge are other examples of metasymbols or even McGuffins that provide the kind of intellectual foundation for the speculative epistemologies at the core of pseudoarchaeological thinking. Part of pseudoarchaeology’s power, of course, is that uses empty symbols to explore the limits of how we understand the past. In this way, Atlantis or the Ark become useful tools with which to think. By recognizing the Ark’s status, then, as a metasymbol we gain insight into how pseudoarchaeology works to open new speculative horizons and to test the limits of archaeological (and scientific reasoning) in various ways.

5. Atari. Atari released a Raiders of the Lost Ark video game in the 1982 and it was developed by Howard Scott Warshaw. One of the critiques of the game was that its graphics were average even for the 1980s. The game play, in contrast, was rather more complex and involved using two controllers (one to control Indy and the other to manage Indy’s inventory of stuff; this allowed the game to escape the key limitation of Adventure where the player could only carry one object at a time). The simply graphics contribute to McGeough’s argument that the Ark itself is less significant as a particular physical (or historical) thing and more significant as an object of desire (in a Freudian sense). By keeping the Ark obscure (graphically), the object of the game remains open to the player’s imagination and this seems like one of the main points of this book.