Chapter 6 THE MISSING

Lost tombs, lost cities, lost knowledge—the gaps in our record.

6.1 Aratta

The Sumerian texts describe a place called Aratta.

It was wealthy beyond measure. Its walls were made of green lapis lazuli. Its craftsmen produced works of unsurpassed beauty. It lay far to the east, beyond seven mountain ranges, in a land where the sun rose. The kings of Uruk competed with Aratta for prestige, sending messengers across vast distances, engaging in contests of riddles and wits.

The stories are vivid. In “Enmerkar and the Lord of Aratta,” the king of Uruk demands tribute; the lord of Aratta resists; messages fly back and forth, growing so complex that the messenger cannot remember them—and so, the text implies, writing is invented to carry what memory cannot hold.

Aratta is foundational to Sumerian literature. It represents the exotic other, the distant rival, the source of precious goods. It must have corresponded to something real—trade networks did connect Mesopotamia to lands rich in lapis lazuli, gold, and silver.

But where was Aratta?

No inscription saying “Aratta” has ever been found outside Mesopotamian texts. No city has been excavated and identified as Aratta. The place exists only in Sumerian memory—and Sumerian memory mixed geography with mythology in ways we cannot always untangle.

Candidate 1: Eastern Iran. The Jiroft culture, discovered in southeastern Iran in the early 2000s, produced sophisticated artifacts dating to the third millennium BCE. Chlorite vessels, carved with elaborate imagery, have been found across the ancient Near East. The region had lapis lazuli, access to the Afghan sources. Could Jiroft be Aratta?

The dates roughly align. The cultural sophistication fits. But there’s no textual confirmation. Jiroft hasn’t yielded inscriptions that mention Aratta—or any readable inscriptions at all.

Candidate 2: Afghanistan. The Bactria-Margiana Archaeological Complex (BMAC), in what is now Afghanistan and Turkmenistan, was another Bronze Age civilization with impressive material culture. Lapis lazuli came from Afghanistan; the Sumerians’ blue stone had to come from somewhere. Perhaps Aratta was the Sumerian name for this distant land.

But Afghanistan is very far from Sumer—over 2,000 kilometers of mountains and deserts. Could Sumerian messengers really have traveled that distance? The texts describe the journey as long but possible. Maybe trade routes connected the cultures even if direct political contact was rare.

Candidate 3: Armenia and the Caucasus. The name “Aratta” has been connected by some scholars to “Urartu,” a later kingdom in the Armenian highlands. The region was rich in metals—tin, copper, gold. The directional fit is worse (northeast rather than east), but ancient geographic terms were imprecise.

Candidate 4: Mythology. Perhaps Aratta was never a single real place. Perhaps it was a composite—the Sumerian imagination’s version of “the East,” combining features of multiple trading partners into one legendary rival. The vivid details might be literary embellishment, not geographic reporting.

We don’t know. Aratta remains a name in texts, a location on no map, a civilization that the Sumerians considered their peer but that we cannot find.

The search continues. Every excavation in Iran, Afghanistan, and Central Asia carries the possibility of discovery. Someday someone might find an inscription, a reference, a confirmation. Or Aratta might remain forever a literary place—real to the Sumerians, inaccessible to us.

6.2 The Tombs

The ancient world buried its great with treasure. Tomb robbery is as old as burial itself. But sometimes the robbers missed their targets. Sometimes the tombs were hidden so well that even millennia of searching failed.

Some tombs remain lost.

Imhotep. The architect of the first pyramid, the Step Pyramid at Saqqara, was later deified as a god of wisdom and medicine. Greeks identified him with Asclepius. Temples were dedicated to him; pilgrims sought his healing.

He must have been buried somewhere. A man of his status would have had an elaborate tomb. But no tomb of Imhotep has been found.

Archaeologists have searched Saqqara extensively. They’ve found the tombs of other officials from the same period. They’ve found animal catacombs, temple complexes, administrative buildings. But the tomb of the man who designed the first monumental stone building in history—nothing.

Possibly it was destroyed. Possibly it’s still buried under sand, waiting. Possibly we’ve found it and didn’t recognize it—attributing it to someone else or failing to read the inscriptions correctly.

Nefertiti. The queen of Akhenaten, famous for the painted bust now in Berlin, disappeared from the historical record around year 12 of Akhenaten’s reign. Did she die? Did she become co-regent under a different name? Did she outlive her husband?

No tomb confidently identified as Nefertiti’s has been found. The mummy designated KV21A, found in the Valley of the Kings, has been proposed as a candidate. DNA testing has proven inconclusive. Radar scans have suggested hidden chambers in Tutankhamun’s tomb—could Nefertiti be there?

The searches continue. Each claim of discovery generates headlines, then controversy, then uncertainty. Nefertiti remains missing.

Alexander the Great. The conqueror died in Babylon in 323 BCE. His body was hijacked by Ptolemy, one of his generals, and taken to Egypt. A magnificent tomb was built in Alexandria—the Soma—and for centuries pilgrims visited it. Augustus reportedly visited; later Roman emperors did too.

Then the tomb was lost.

Alexandria has been continuously inhabited for over two thousand years. It’s been conquered, burned, flooded, rebuilt. The ancient city lies beneath the modern one, and beneath the sea. The Soma could be under an apartment block, under a mosque, under the harbor. Excavation is extremely difficult.

Theories abound. Some place the tomb under the Mosque of the Prophet Daniel. Some suggest it was moved to Venice in the ninth century (the body of St. Mark, brought from Alexandria, might be Alexander—or so the theory goes). Some think it was destroyed in ancient riots.

We don’t know. One of history’s most famous figures lies in an unmarked grave, location unknown.

Cleopatra. The last pharaoh, who died in 30 BCE, was buried with Mark Antony in a tomb she had prepared. Ancient sources describe it as magnificent—but no one knows where it is.

The tomb is probably in Alexandria, probably underwater or beneath buildings. Archaeologist Kathleen Martinez has spent decades searching near the temple of Taposiris Magna, believing Cleopatra might have been buried at a sacred site outside the city. She’s found tombs, artifacts, evidence of elite burials—but not Cleopatra.

The search continues. Like Alexander, Cleopatra awaits discovery.

6.3 The Ark

The Ark of the Covenant was the most sacred object in ancient Israel.

According to Exodus, it was built to precise divine specifications: acacia wood overlaid with gold, topped by two cherubim with wings outspread, containing the tablets of the Law that Moses received at Sinai. God’s presence dwelt above the Ark, between the cherubim. The Ark went before the Israelites in battle. It brought down the walls of Jericho. It struck dead those who touched it improperly.

Solomon placed the Ark in the Holy of Holies, the innermost chamber of the Temple in Jerusalem. Only the High Priest could enter, once a year, on Yom Kippur. The Ark was the meeting point between heaven and earth.

And then it vanished.

The Babylonians destroyed Solomon’s Temple in 586 BCE. They carried off the Temple treasures—the biblical book of Kings lists them carefully. But the Ark is not mentioned. When the exiles returned and built the Second Temple, the Holy of Holies was empty. The Ark was gone.

What happened?

Theory 1: Babylonian destruction. The simplest explanation. The Babylonians destroyed or melted down the Ark along with everything else. The biblical writers didn’t mention it because the loss was too painful to record.

Theory 2: Hidden before the destruction. Jeremiah, according to later tradition (2 Maccabees), hid the Ark in a cave on Mount Nebo before the Babylonians arrived. The location was kept secret and eventually forgotten.

Other traditions suggest the Ark was hidden in tunnels beneath the Temple Mount itself. When the Temple was rebuilt, no one knew where to look—or the knowledge was restricted to a few who died without passing it on.

Theory 3: Egyptian capture. The pharaoh Shishak invaded Jerusalem around 926 BCE, during the reign of Solomon’s son. First Kings says he took “the treasures of the house of the Lord.” Did that include the Ark? Some think Shishak carried it to Egypt, where it might still lie in an undiscovered tomb or temple.

Theory 4: Ethiopian custody. Ethiopian tradition holds that the Ark was taken to Ethiopia by Menelik I, the son of Solomon and the Queen of Sheba. It rests, they say, in the Church of Our Lady Mary of Zion in Axum, guarded by a single monk who never leaves its presence.

This tradition is central to Ethiopian Christianity. Replicas of the Ark (called tabot) are venerated in every Ethiopian Orthodox church. But no outside researcher has been allowed to examine the claimed original. Scholars are skeptical; believers are certain.

Theory 5: Never existed as described. Perhaps the Ark was a real cult object—a portable shrine, not uncommon in ancient religion—but the biblical descriptions exaggerated its splendor and significance. The “real” Ark might have been a wooden box that rotted away, or was destroyed in some earlier catastrophe, and the elaborate descriptions in Exodus are later literary elaboration.

This theory is unprovable, like the others. We cannot reconstruct what we cannot find.

The Ark’s disappearance is perhaps the most famous absence in ancient history. It has inspired novels, films, endless speculation. What we know is what we don’t have: the object, the explanation, the closure.

The Holy of Holies is empty. The silence endures.

6.4 The Name

Some knowledge is lost by accident. Other knowledge is lost on purpose.

The most sacred name in ancient Israel was יהוה—the four letters rendered in English as YHWH or JHVH, sometimes called the Tetragrammaton. This was the personal name of God, revealed to Moses at the burning bush: “I AM WHO I AM.”

The name was written constantly. It appears nearly seven thousand times in the Hebrew Bible. Scribes copied it letter by letter, text after text, for centuries.

But they stopped saying it.

At some point—probably in the late Second Temple period, around the third century BCE—the name became too holy to pronounce. When readers encountered יהוה in the text, they substituted Adonai (“Lord”) or HaShem (“The Name”). The actual pronunciation was reserved for the High Priest, once a year, in the Holy of Holies.

Then the Temple was destroyed. There was no more Holy of Holies, no more High Priest making the annual utterance. The chain of oral transmission broke.

By the early centuries CE, no one remembered how to say the name.

The Hebrew alphabet writes only consonants. Vowels were understood by native speakers and, later, indicated by diacritical marks added in the medieval period. But the marks added to יהוה were deliberately misleading—they were the vowels of Adonai, reminding readers to say that word instead. When medieval Christians read the marks literally, they produced “Jehovah”—a hybrid that no ancient speaker ever pronounced.

What was the real pronunciation?

Yahweh is the scholarly consensus—based on several lines of evidence:

Greek transcriptions from early centuries CE (Clement of Alexandria wrote Ἰαουε, approximately “Iaoue”)
Theophoric names (names containing the divine name), like Eliyahu (Elijah), which suggest “Yahu” or “Yaho”
Samaritan traditions preserving an approximation
Linguistic reconstruction of Hebrew phonology

But “Yahweh” is a reconstruction, not a recording. We cannot be certain. Some scholars prefer “Yaho” or “Yahwo.” The debate continues.

The deeper point is that the loss was intentional. The name was not forgotten through neglect; it was suppressed through reverence. The Israelites decided that the name was too sacred for common speech, and they succeeded in removing it from human knowledge.

This is a different kind of absence. The undeciphered scripts are mute because we lack the key. The lost tombs are hidden because time and earth buried them. But the divine name was silenced by the very people who knew it—and their silence was so complete that even with texts, even with evidence, we cannot fully break it.

Some things are lost because they were meant to be.