Stele of Zakkur
Unknown · Early eighth century BC, circa 800 BC
Only the lower part of the monument survives, a block of dark stone just over a metre high, and yet it carries one of the most important inscriptions of ancient Syria. At the top you can make out the feet and the hem of a pleated robe belonging to a standing figure on a raised platform: this is Zakkur, king of Hamath and Luash, whose image once dominated the stele. Below and around him, cut in the clean alphabetic letters of Old Aramaic, runs a commemorative text that continues over the sides. The surface is eroded and the block has been broken and rejoined, so take your time with the lines of script.
The inscription tells a story of survival. Zakkur, a usurper who came from the Euphrates region, was besieged in his city of Hazrak by a coalition of sixteen or seventeen kings led by Bar-Hadad, son of Hazael, king of Aram Damascus. In his distress the king lifted his hands to Baalshamayn, the lord of the heavens, and the god answered him through seers, promising that he would deliver him. The siege was lifted, and Zakkur set up this stele before the god Iluwer as a thanksgiving, listing his building works and calling down curses on anyone who removed it. The text is one of the earliest examples of a prophetic oracle recorded outside the Bible, and its language echoes the reassurances that Israel's prophets gave to their own kings.
The stele was found at Tell Afis in northern Syria, the site of ancient Hazrak, and was published in nineteen oh seven by the French consul and scholar Henri Pognon; the Louvre purchased it in the early nineteen twenties. Hamath and its neighbours were the Aramaean and Neo-Hittite kingdoms that filled Syria between the fall of the Hittites and the Assyrian conquest, and Bar-Hadad's coalition shows the shifting alliances of that world. For historians of religion the stele is precious: a king, a god who speaks through prophets, and a city saved by faith, written down a generation or two before the prophet Isaiah.
Did You Know? Zakkur claims that the god Baalshamayn spoke to him through seers during the siege, one of the oldest written records of prophecy outside the Bible.
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