Edward Ullendorff
British scholar of Ethiopian and Semitic languages
- Born
- 1920, Berlin
- Died
- 2011, Oxford
- Position
- First chair of Ethiopian Studies anywhere, SOAS (1964)
- Known for
- Studies of Ethiopia, Amharic, Ge'ez and the Bible in Ethiopia
- Ark claim
- Said he saw the Aksum 'Ark' in 1941: a medieval box
Ethiopian-studies pioneer who said that, as a soldier in 1941, he saw the object at Aksum claimed to be the Ark: an empty medieval box.
What is Edward Ullendorff known for?
Edward Ullendorff was a Berlin-born British scholar of Semitic languages and Ethiopia. In 1964 the School of Oriental and African Studies in London created for him the world's first chair of Ethiopian Studies. In 1979 he took the chair of Semitic Languages at SOAS and retired in 1982. He died in Oxford in 2011.
During the Second World War he served as a British officer in Ethiopia. He later said that in 1941 he was shown the object kept at the Church of Our Lady Mary of Zion in Aksum, which Ethiopian Orthodox tradition holds to be the Ark of the Covenant brought from Jerusalem by Menelik I, son of Solomon and the Queen of Sheba, as told in the Kebra Nagast. In a 1992 interview he described it as an empty wooden box of middle- to late-medieval make.
Access to the object is restricted to a single guardian monk, so no other outside scholar is known to have examined it. The church does not accept his description.
The site cites Ullendorff as the only outside scholar known to have seen the 'Ark' at Aksum, which he called an empty medieval box.
Mentioned on these pages
- Rabbit holeArk of the Covenant
Sources
- Wikipedia, 'Edward Ullendorff'Reference
- David L. Appleyard, 'Obituary: Edward Ullendorff, 1920–2011', Bulletin of SOAS (Cambridge Core)Reference
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