For Judaism and Christianity the Ark is a real object of sacred history, described in detail in Scripture and central to the theology of the divine presence. That is the tradition's claim, and it is not in dispute as tradition. What scholarship can establish is narrower. There is no surviving Ark, no contemporary depiction, and no archaeological find that can be tied to it; the object is known only from texts, the earliest of which were edited long after the events they describe. On these grounds historians treat the Ark as legendary in the technical sense used here: its physical existence cannot be demonstrated.
The Aksum claim is the one testable-sounding assertion, and it too resists testing. Access to the chapel is forbidden to everyone but a single appointed guardian-monk, so the object there has never been independently examined, photographed or dated. Edward Ullendorff, a leading scholar of Ethiopian studies, stated that he had seen the object during the Second World War and regarded it as an ordinary altar tabot rather than the biblical Ark, and most historians treat the tradition as a powerful expression of Ethiopian Orthodox identity, rooted in the Kebra Nagast, rather than as verifiable custody. The honest position is therefore a double one: a deeply held religious tradition on one side, and an absence of external evidence on the other, recorded here without resolving in favour of either.