Mesha Stele
Unknown · Ninth century BC, circa 830 BC
A slab of black basalt with a rounded top, one hundred and twenty-five centimetres high, covered with thirty-four lines of writing. Look closely and you will see that the stone is a patchwork: darker original fragments have been set into a lighter reconstruction, and parts of the text are restored from a paper squeeze taken before the stele was broken. The script is the alphabet of the Phoenicians, and the language is Moabite, a dialect so close to biblical Hebrew that anyone who reads the Bible in the original can follow it. The words are separated by dots, and the lines run from right to left.
The speaker is Mesha, king of Moab, east of the Dead Sea. He tells how Omri, king of Israel, had oppressed Moab for many years because the Moabite god Kemosh was angry with his land, and how Kemosh then delivered Moab and let Mesha take back city after city from Israel, building cisterns, walls and a high place for the god at Qarho. In one line he records the capture of a town where he took the vessels of Yahweh and dragged them before Kemosh. The museum dates the carving to shortly after eight hundred and forty-two BC, when the stele was set up to mark the building of a sanctuary for Kemosh.
The stele was seen at Dhiban in Jordan in eighteen sixty-eight, and the rivalry of Europeans to buy it led the local tribesmen to heat the stone and shatter it with cold water, dividing the pieces. Charles Clermont-Ganneau, who had obtained a squeeze of the intact text, gathered most of the fragments, and the Louvre acquired the reconstructed stele in eighteen seventy-three. It is the longest royal inscription ever found from the world of the Bible and the oldest monument to mention Israel's king Omri and the name of the God of Israel, a Moabite voice speaking of the same wars that the Book of Kings tells from the other side.
Did You Know? The stele was deliberately shattered in eighteen sixty-nine by locals who heated it and poured water on it, and the missing text is known only from a paper squeeze made before the break.
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