Headpiece to the Staff of Ra
The medallion that, on a staff of the right length, points to the Well of Souls.
The headpiece to the Staff of Ra is the medallion that Abner Ravenwood, whose lifelong obsession was the Ark of the Covenant, owned because it could pinpoint the Ark's location. In 1936 Indiana Jones offers his daughter Marion money for it in her bar in Nepal. Combined with a staff of the correct length, it is used to locate the Well of Souls, the Ark's resting place.
Quick Facts
- Target location
- Well of Souls, Tanis, Egypt
Lore & Background
Gestapo agent Arnold Toht and his men come to take the medallion from Marion; her bar is set ablaze, and Toht only burns its image into his hand while trying to recover it from the flames. Jones and Marion escape with it. The Nazis make an incomplete replica from the image burned into Toht's hand, but an imam deciphers the real one for Jones: one side bears a warning against disturbing the Ark, and the other, which the Nazis do not have, gives a correction to the measurements for the staff of Ra. The Nazis therefore dig in the wrong location.
Reader's Guide
In Campbell Black's novelization, the headpiece carries explicit instructions not to look at the opened Ark. In an early concept for Temple of Doom the headpiece was to come in two pieces, the first in the museum of General Hok, a Japanese-allied Chinese warlord in Shanghai, and the cancelled Dark Horse comic Indiana Jones and the Lost Horizon was to show Abner Ravenwood and Indiana recovering it in Tibet in 1926.
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