This object, now in a musuem in Harare, Zumabwe, dates from 1300. Purely indigenous drum? Replica of the Ark of the Covenant? The ways we attach meaning to ancient objects tells us far more about the present than about the past.
The Seraphim were terrifying Biblical monsters, even if contemporary Christianity imagines them as more benign angelic creatures. They appear in the Hebrew Bible (Christian Old…