| Mesha Stele | |
| Material: | Basalt |
| Writing: | Moabite language |
| Discovered: | 1868–70 |
| Location: | Louvre |
| Id: | AO 5066 |
The Mesha Stele, also known as the Moabite Stone, is a stele dated around 840 BCE containing a significant Canaanite inscription in the name of King Mesha of Moab (a kingdom located in modern Jordan). Mesha tells how Chemosh, the god of Moab, had been angry with his people and had allowed them to be subjugated to the Kingdom of Israel, but at length, Chemosh returned and assisted Mesha to throw off the yoke of Israel and restore the lands of Moab. Mesha also describes his many building projects. It is written in a variant of the Phoenician alphabet, closely related to the Paleo-Hebrew script.[1]
The stone was discovered intact by Frederick Augustus Klein, an Anglican missionary, at the site of ancient Dibon (now Dhiban, Jordan), in August 1868. A "squeeze" (a papier-mâché impression) had been obtained by a local Arab on behalf of Charles Simon Clermont-Ganneau, an archaeologist based in the French consulate in Jerusalem. The next year, the stele was smashed into several fragments by the Bani Hamida tribe, seen as an act of defiance against the Ottoman authorities who had pressured the Bedouins to hand over the stele so that it could be given to Germany. Clermont-Ganneau later managed to acquire the fragments and piece them together thanks to the impression made before the stele's destruction.[2]
The Mesha Stele, the first major epigraphic Canaanite inscription found in the Southern Levant,[3] the longest Iron Age inscription ever found in the region, constitutes the major evidence for the Moabite language, and is a "corner-stone of Semitic epigraphy", and history.[4] The stele, whose story parallels, with some differences, an episode in the Bible's Books of Kings (–27), provides invaluable information on the Moabite language and the political relationship between Moab and Israel at one moment in the 9th century BCE. It is the most extensive inscription ever recovered that refers to the kingdom of Israel (the "House of Omri");[5] it bears the earliest certain extrabiblical reference to the Israelite God Yahweh.[5] It is also one of four known contemporaneous inscriptions containing the name of Israel, the others being the Merneptah Stele, the Tel Dan Stele, and one of the Kurkh Monoliths.[6] [7] Its authenticity has been disputed over the years, and some biblical minimalists suggest the text was not historical, but a biblical allegory. The stele itself is regarded as genuine and historical by the vast majority of biblical archaeologists today.[8]
The stele has been part of the collection of the Louvre Museum in Paris, France, since 1873. Jordan has been demanding its return to its place of origin since 2014.[9]
The stele is a smoothed block of basalt about a meter tall, 60 cm wide, and 60 cm thick, bearing a surviving inscription of 34 lines.
Frederick Klein, an Anglican missionary, discovered the stone intact in August 1868 at the site of ancient Dibon (now Dhiban, Jordan). Klein was led to it by Sattam Al-Fayez, son of Fendi Al-Fayez, the emir of the Bani Sakher.[10] although neither of them could read the text.[11] At that time, amateur explorers and archaeologists were scouring the Levant for evidence proving the historicity of the Bible. News of the finding set off a race between France, Britain, and Germany to acquire the piece.
A "squeeze" (a papier-mâché impression) of the full stele had been obtained just before its destruction. Ginsberg's translation of the official report, "Über die Auffindung der Moabitischen Inschrift",[12] stated that Charles Simon Clermont-Ganneau, an archaeologist based in the French consulate in Jerusalem, sent an Arab named Yacoub Caravacca to obtain the squeeze as he "did not want to venture to undertake the very costly [and dangerous] journey" himself. Caravacca was injured by the local Bedouin while obtaining the squeeze, and one of his two accompanying horsemen protected the squeeze by tearing it still damp from the stone in seven fragments before escaping.
In November 1869, the stele was broken by the local Bedouins, the Bani Hamida, after the Ottoman government became involved in the ownership dispute. The previous year the Bani Hamida had been defeated by an expedition to Balqa led by Mehmed Rashid Pasha, the head of Syria vilayet. Knowing that a demand to give up the stone to the German Consulate had been ordered by the Ottomans and finding that the ruler of Salt was about to put pressure upon them, they heated the stele in a bonfire, threw cold water upon it and broke it to pieces with boulders.
On 8 February 1870, George Grove of the Palestine Exploration Fund announced the find of the stele in a letter to The Times, attributing the discovery to Charles Warren. On 17 February 1870, the 24-year-old Clermont-Ganneau published the first detailed announcement of the stele in the Revue de l’Instruction Publique.[13] This was followed a month later by a note from F. A. Klein published in The Pall Mall Gazette describing his discovery of the stele in August 1868:
Pieces of the original stele containing most of the inscription, 613 letters out of about a thousand, were later recovered and pieced together. Of the existing stele fragments, the top right fragment contains 150 letters, the bottom right fragment includes 358 letters, the middle right contains 38, and the rest contains 67 letters. The remainder of the stele was reconstructed by Ganneau from the squeeze obtained by Caravacca.
Visiting the site in 1872, Henry B. Tristram was convinced that the stele could not have been exposed for long and believed that it had probably been utilized as building material by the Roman era until thrown down in the Galilee earthquake of 1837.[14]
The inscription, known as KAI 181 is pictured to the right, and presented here after Compston, 1919, to be read right to left.:[15]