TRUE RAIDERS

The fascinating story of a bizarre expedition to find one of the most famous of all historical artifacts.

Ricca focuses primarily on Monty Parker (1878-1962), a veteran of the Second Boer War and the younger son of a British earl. In 1908, he was approached by a syndicate founded to explore the claims of Valter Juvelius, a Finnish researcher who claimed to have found a cipher in the Bible revealing the location of the Ark of the Covenant. Parker joined the effort partly in hopes of impressing Ava Astor, a wealthy divorcée who’d caught his eye, but mainly because of the enormous value the Ark was expected to bring its discovers. By the fall of 1908, Parker, Juvelius, and other members of the expedition were in Jerusalem, planning to explore a system of tunnels under the city. Ricca chronicles the 1867 exploration of the tunnels by Sir Charles Warren, a British officer with a strong interest in archaeology, giving readers some context and a clear sense of the difficulties of the project. But Parker’s expedition, aided by squads of local laborers and financed by rich donors in Britain and America, was on a much grander scale. As they began to open up the maze of tunnels, they were joined by Father Vincent, a local priest who helped them uncover a few artifacts of archaeological significance. Meanwhile, Parker pushed ahead, doing his best to make sense of Juvelius’ clues while keeping his purpose hidden from everyone outside the syndicate. In the end, the project fell apart, achieving little beyond enraging the local Muslim population after an attempt to dig inside the Mosque of Omar. Ricca tells the story in novelistic style, switching viewpoints and inventing conversations, which somewhat compensates for the lack of any real denouement to the adventure.

An entertaining if slight telling of what was ultimately a minor episode in the history of archaeology.