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Well of the Souls

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This article is about Well of Souls at Tanis. You may be looking for the Peruvian Well of Souls.

The Well of the Souls (or simply Well of Souls) was a vault, part of a temple built within the ancient city of Tanis, where the Ark of the Covenant was placed after Pharaoh Shishak stole it from Jerusalem.

History[]

Origins[]

The Well of the Souls was built after the Ark of the Covenant was taken to Tanis by Pharaoh Shishak around the year 980 BC.[4] A vault,[3] part of a temple commissioned to honor the Egyptian war dead who fell in Shishak's military campaign against the Israelites, was used to hide the Ark from Amun-Ra, the Egyptian sun god. The Ark was removed from the pharaoh's palace[4] and placed in a stone sarcophagus within the Well,[1] far from the sight of man or god.[4] The upraised arms of a quartet of colossal Anubis statues supported the ceiling of the Well,[1] while a series of nearby chambers contained sarcophagus and mummies of royal attendants.[5] The hieroglyphics on the stone chest holding the Ark told that the pharaoh Shishak had commissioned the Well of the Souls to contain the Ark.[6] Snakes were also a preventive measure, meant to discourage and possibly kill those who wanted to take the Ark for their own purposes.[4] A Map Room was built to help locate the resting places of the Ark,[1] its floor tiles divided the solar year into a calendar, so that the Well of the Souls could be found at any time of year with a correctly proportioned Staff of Ra.[7]

These precautions did not hide the Ark from the Hebrew God, as a year later a violent sandstorm buried Tanis,[1] and the location of the Well of Souls was seemingly lost to history.[5]

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, let alone the Well of Souls.[5] During excavation of a site in Nepal he realized that the Ark was not there, but was still resting in the Well of Souls.[4]

Discovery[]

By 1936, the Well of the Souls was still infested with snakes,[1] including thousands of asps,[1] pythons and cobras,[8] that slithered in through the walls.[1] That year René Emile Belloq, hired by the Nazis to search the Ark,[1] excavated an obelisk in Tanis where many of the inscriptions, still readable, indicated the true story behind the Ark's entombment in the well. After opening the Map Room, he obtained a copy of the elusive headpiece to the Staff of Ra from Arnold Ernst Toht. After using the headpiece to determine the location of the chamber, he made several survey measurements and instructed the diggers to begin excavating. The building indicated in the Map Room was a large mausoleum-style structure with a ramp leading up to its entrance.[4] As the copy of the headpiece was incomplete, they were actually digging in the wrong place.[1]

Wellr2

Indiana Jones opens the stone sarcophagus containing the Ark.

Indiana Jones and Sallah, who had the actual headpiece and managed to identify the exact location, found the chamber and had to fend off the reptiles using gasoline and torches to get to the stone coffin that contained the Ark. Both men worked together to lift the coffin's heavy lid before tossing it aside and using long handles to lift the Ark out.[1] Indy intended to take the Ark away and cover their trail, so the Nazis would find the Well within the next day or so with the Ark long gone by then.[6] They placed it in a crate and had their men lift it out, but Sallah was captured by Nazis who dropped the rope, trapping Jones. Marion Ravenwood was thrown into the chamber with Jones by the Nazis despite Belloq's protests. Under orders of Colonel Herman Dietrich, the Nazis slammed the tomb shut with Jones and Ravenwood inside,[1] sealing the Well of the Souls for eternity.[7] While the Ark was taken away, a couple of Nazi guards supervised the re-burial of the entrance slab.[5]

Such a fate was predicted by Alecia Dunstin in 1934, who told Indy of her recurring nightmare where he would wind up sealed in a tomb filled with thousands of snakes shortly before her death at Rudolf Reingold's hands.[9] However, both Jones and Ravenwood ultimately found a way out from the Well, as Jones broke through one of the walls of the chamber, revealing a room filled with many mummified corpses that frightened Ravenwood before the two made their way out of the Well.[1]

Legacy[]

Despite surviving,[1] however, Indy continued to have nightmares of the Well of the Souls by 1938, as he reflected upon coming across rats while looking for Sir Richard's tomb in Venice's catacombs, thankful they weren't snakes.[10]

Behind the scenes[]

The Well of the Souls contains references to George Lucas' Star Wars film series. The first on a wall which featured the droids R2-D2 and C-3PO, while the another featured Princess Leia Organa inserting the Death Star plans into R2-D2.[1] Brian Muir worked on those designs, though he didn't recall when asked by Indymag in 2017 who had the idea to make them, though he suspects it was ordered by director Steven Spielberg or Lucas,[11] while Bill Hargreaves recalled it may have been production designer Norman Reynolds the one behind the reference.[12]

WellOfSouls

A pair of droids from a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away....

Hargreaves and Reynolds did a lot of set decoration for the Well of the Souls set, with Hargreaves making a lightweight flame torch for the interior so Harrison Ford could use it in the scene, which involved him grabbing it with his mouth while climbing the Anubis Statue and spinning it to a snake. When Hargreaves consulted Spielberg on how to do it, Spielberg yawned due to having been busy clubbing. Hargreaves also designed the mummies.[12] Three thousand snakes were ordered months in advance, but when the production crew laid out the snakes, they discovered that 3,000 was no where near enough to carpet the set as the scenes called for. Another 7,000 snakes were procured, for a total of 10,000 snakes.

The wide shot of Indiana Jones and the Arab diggers at sunset digging over the Well of Souls were partly inspired by the one of the many vistas represented in the late David Lean's 1962 film Lawrence of Arabia, which is considered by director Spielberg as his favorite film and the one which inspired him to became a filmmaker.[13] When Jones is dressed as an Egyptian worker during the Map Room scenes, he closely resembles the on-screen T.E. Lawrence after the grateful Arabs give him Bedouin clothes.[14]

While the Well of Souls featured in the film is depicted in Egypt, there is an actual "Well of Souls" from which the legend of the Ark is based. It can be found under the Foundation Stone under the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem. The well is accessable to visitors as a stairwell has been made for storing the Ark beneath the stone in case of war.[15]

Appearances[]

Sources[]

Notes and references[]

  1. ↑ 1.00 1.01 1.02 1.03 1.04 1.05 1.06 1.07 1.08 1.09 1.10 1.11 1.12 1.13 1.14 1.15 1.16 Raiders of the Lost Ark
  2. ↑ Although the Raiders of the Lost Ark Sourcebook has Shishak's reign come later in the century, it does establish the Well of the Souls as having been built following his invasion of Jerusalem, dated as around 980 BC by the film.
  3. ↑ 3.0 3.1 IndianaJones.com Ark of the Covenant's Marshall College entry on IndianaJones.com (backup link on Archive.org)
  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 Indiana Jones: The Ultimate Guide
  6. ↑ 6.0 6.1 Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark junior novel
  7. ↑ 7.0 7.1 Raiders of the Lost Ark comic
  8. ↑ Indiana Jones: The Search For Buried Treasure
  9. ↑ Indiana Jones and the Hollow Earth
  10. ↑ Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade novel
  11. ↑ Indymag, February 2017
  12. ↑ 12.0 12.1 Indymag, August 2017
  13. ↑ A Conversation with Steven Spielberg
  14. ↑ Lawrence of Arabia - Indiana Jones' Influences at TheRaider.net
  15. ↑ Jerusalem's Mysterious Well of Souls May Hold Ancient Secrets at National Geographic

External links[]

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