Fools. Bureaucratic fools. They don't know what they've got there.

Researcher Tudor Parfitt thinks he has traced the Ark of the Covenant to the bottom shelf of a museum in Harare, Zimbabwe.

There, amidst nesting mice, was an old drum with an uncharacteristic burnt-black bottom hole ("As if it had been used like a cannon," Parfitt notes), the remains of carrying rings on its corners; and a raised relief of crossed reeds that Parfitt thinks reflects an Old Testament detail. "I felt a shiver go down my spine," he writes.

The ngoma is an artifact of the Lemba—who according to genetic markers appear to be correct in their belief that they are one of the lost tribes of Israel—and is said to have been built out of the ruins of the original Ark.