Where was the Ark of the Covenant kept?

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The ark was made at Sinai and carried through the wilderness in the tabernacle; after the crossing of the Jordan it stood at Gilgal and then, for the age of the judges, at Shiloh. Captured by the Philistines in the battle by Ebenezer, it was taken to Ashdod, Gath and Ekron, sent back from Ekron on a cart to Beth-shemesh, 12 km away, and from there carried up to Kiriath-jearim, where the map point stands: Deir el-Azar above Abu Ghosh, 13 km west of Jerusalem. There it stayed some twenty years until David brought it to Jerusalem, and Solomon set it in the Holy of Holies of the Temple, about 959 BC. After Solomon's day the Old Testament mentions it only twice more, and what became of it when the Babylonians burned the Temple in 587 or 586 BC is not recorded. Samuel tells the last stages: “And the men of Kirjath-jearim came, and fetched up the ark of the LORD, and brought it into the house of Abinadab in the hill, and sanctified Eleazar his son to keep the ark of the LORD. And it came to pass, while the ark abode in Kirjath-jearim, that the time was long; for it was twenty years”. Of the Temple Kings says that “the priests brought in the ark of the covenant of the LORD unto his place, into the oracle of the house, to the most holy place, even under the wings of the cherubims”. Josiah told the Levites, “Put the holy ark in the house which Solomon the son of David king of Israel did build”, and Jeremiah foresaw a day when “they shall say no more, The ark of the covenant of the LORD: neither shall it come to mind”. Where it is now has been asked ever since. It is absent from the lists of Temple vessels carried to Babylon; 2 Maccabees says that Jeremiah hid it in a cave on Mount Nebo; the Mishnah tells of its being hidden under the floor of a Temple chamber, while a rabbinic view in the Talmud has it taken to Babylon; Josephus says that the Holy of Holies of Herod's Temple held nothing at all. The Ethiopian Kebra Nagast has Menelik, son of Solomon and the queen of Sheba, carry it to Aksum, where the church of Our Lady Mary of Zion claims to keep it, unseen by all but its guardian. Revelation sees it in the temple in heaven. At Kiriath-jearim Israel Finkelstein and Thomas Römer, excavating in 2017 and 2019, found a great platform of the eighth century BC on the summit, under the church of Our Lady of the Ark of the Covenant built in 1924.