Jumping ahead in time...Hatshepsut (hat-cheap-suit) was the wife of Thutmose II...When he died she proclaimed herself Queen...and denied the underage son of Thutmose II and III from claiming the throne and adding the third Roman numeral to his name...For appearances sake she often wore a fake beard during official ceremonies...a fact which did not fool the young Thutmose for a minute...he was a shap little tack...As he would watch his mother's bearded lady act...Her power held sway until her (un)natural death...

When Thutmose III came to the throne...he spent a fair amount of time destroying the temples and monuments built to honor Hatshepsut...must have been due to the fake beard...The Egyptian priests however were not at all that prone to the idea of destroying sacred temples and the like...but Thutmose III pretty much got his way over the years...

Except for the one object of immense religious value...that of an obelisk raised to glorify Hatshepsut...this is where the priests drew the line in the sand!...obelisks were far too sacred to be defaced by an unhappy beardless child...let alone make...Thutmose III could not destroy this last reminder of the woman who had kept his throne from him...

But where there's a pharaoh's will...there's a way...Instead of destroying the object...They had to build a close fitting wall around it and then fill the space with sand...The obelisk was not harmed...Out of sight...out of his mind!...

The lasting irony of this is that while all of the monuments of Egypt have suffered damage over the last several thousand years...the one object which is the best preserved is the one which was protected by a close-fitting wall and an intervening space of dry sand...Queen Hatshepsut's obelisk is one of the best preserved of all of the monuments of Egypt...and all because of a son's thoughtfulness of his bearded mother...and her circus act!...

A big mystery has been the location of where the famed Queen of Sheba came on a visit to King Solomon...On the one hand it is interesting to note that her reason for the visit was to meet a real man...a king...Any woman worthy of being a top notch queen would...it would seem...want to experience a king who was man enough to have a large number of wives...Someone with power...as in power is an aphrodisiac and cheep wine...

To get to Jerusalem from Egypt...if one was looking for the more relaxing and scenic route...it is advised to take a barge down the Nile...head into the Mediterranean Sea...and then dock at a port as close as possible to Jerusalem... In a nutshell...Queen Hatshepsut and the Queen of Sheba are one and the same!...

King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba is not just your typical run-of-the-mill royal love story...They had a kid...Hatshepsut left Israel with a little contraband of a sort...stuffed in her womb...Back in Egypt she gave birth to a son she named Menelik... The Jewish priests found the idea of a half-breed son in their royal midst to be anything but acceptable...

They pressured Solomon mercilessly...urging that the royal bastard to be shipped off to parts unknown...any place outside of Israel...Solomon being the cagy old man that he was...agreed...The kicker was that his son should have a royal entourage...So the eldest son from each of the priests' families were chosen!...

The eldest sons of the Temple priests were also the keepers of the Ark of the Covenant...Menelik and his entourage departed Israel carrying along with them one of the most precious artifacts of Judaism...the Ark of the Covenant...Ole mom knew what she was doing!...

If one wonders how the priests could possibly have allowed such an apparent catastrophe...one must recall the history of the Ark...the fact that almost as many Hebrews had been killed by an out-of-control weapon as had enemies of Israel ...The Ark was in many respects an accident waiting to happen...It was locked away in the Temple not so much to protect it from bad guys...but to protect the good guys from the Ark's random lazer blasts...And the only people who could periodically get close to it were the sons who were leaving on a jet plane with Menelik...

Menelik and the Ark Boys took the Ark to Egypt and there on the island of Elephantine...constructed a Temple similar to King Solomon's Temple...and there they placed the Ark of the Covenant...Jerusalem may have lost a great asset and liability all in one...but the priests always knew where to find it...Just not what to do with it when they saw it...but at least they knew where it was...