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Map Room

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The Map Room was a chapel in Tanis, Egypt that revealed the location of the Well of the Souls, the resting place of the Ark of the Covenant, on a scale model of the city but only when sunlight passed directly through the headpiece to the Staff of Ra. The room was commissioned by Shishak so that the Egyptian god Amun-Ra could know where the Ark was located in Tanis, without having to look at it.

History[]

Creation and research[]

The Map Room was originally built to help locate the resting places of the Ark in the city of Tanis, placed by Pharaon Shishak in the Well of Souls,[2] and to allow Amun-Ra to perpetually monitor the Ark’s whereabouts.[3] The Map Room ran east-west, with a dome in the east and a vaulted chamber in the west, over the actual city model of Tanis,[4] exactly as it had looked thousand of years ago.[5]

According to legends[6] the map room would the correct place of the Well by using a correctly-sized Staff of Ra with its headpiece.[2] Its floor tiles divided the solar year into a calendar[6] and each slot was marked with a different time of year,[5] so that the Well of the Souls could be found at any time of year with a correctly proportioned Staff of Ra.[6] Its walls were decorated full of hieroglyphics[7] and paintings, which completed the story of the Ark's entombment.[4]

Visiting the ruins of Tanis in the 1920s, Abner Ravenwood unearthed the headpiece to the Staff of Ra close to the village of San el-Hagar, but was unsuccessful in discovering Tanis' Map Room.[3]

Discovery[]

By 1936 the dome was broken by what was once a round portal to allow the morning sunlight inside and the original entrance has been blocked up by fallen rubble from an adjacent structure and covered by the desert's shifting sands[4] That year the French mercenary René Emile Belloq, hired by the Nazis to search the Ark of the Covenant,[2] discovered the Map Room on the ridge separating the camp from Herman Dietrich's airfield and storage area.[4] It was first uncovered by the diggers led by Sallah Mohammed Faisel el-Kahir, who had personally broke into the map room.[8] The Germans carelessly allowed ropes and chains to wear away at the bottom edge of the portal, leaving a deformed keyhole. The interior model gave an accurate layout of the city, although difficult to match the exact city plan of Tanis to the jumbled ruins that remained.[4] Belloq designed a replica of the headpiece[8] based on the inscription of the original that had scarred its shape onto the palm of Major Arnold Ernst Toht in Nepal.[2] Belloq wrote his calculations on the model[8] and determined a location,[2] a large mausoleum-style structure with a ramp leading up to its entrance,[4] signing the model building with the script nicht stören ("do not disturb"). They were unaware that the original piece had more directions written on the reverse. As such, he went digging in the wrong place.[2]

American archaeologist Indiana Jones, in possession of the true headpiece, later visited the room with the Staff of Ra.[2] For one magic moment he could imagine the people, the horses, the chariots, all the pulsing life of the long-buried city.[5] With his version of the Staff just a carefully measured shaft of wood, he inserted it into the correct slot[2] he was looking for[5] on the floor and waited for sunrise. At just after nine a.m. sunlight hit the headpiece's crystal center, shining a beam of red light upon the model of the city, pointing to the Well of Souls. After measuring out where the location was in the model, Jones broke the staff and waited for Sallah to return to pull him out of the chamber.[2]

Jones found a discarded map of Tanis left by Belloq and kept it in his journal.[9]

Appearances[]

Sources[]

Notes and references[]

  1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 Raiders of the Lost Ark Sourcebook
  2. ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 2.5 2.6 2.7 2.8 Raiders of the Lost Ark
  3. ↑ 3.0 3.1 Indiana Jones: The Ultimate Guide
  4. ↑ 4.0 4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4 4.5 Raiders of the Lost Ark Sourcebook
  5. ↑ 5.0 5.1 5.2 5.3 Raiders of the Lost Ark storybook
  6. ↑ 6.0 6.1 6.2 Raiders of the Lost Ark comic
  7. ↑ Indiana Jones: The Search For Buried Treasure
  8. ↑ 8.0 8.1 8.2 Raiders of the Lost Ark novel
  9. ↑ The Lost Journal of Indiana Jones
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