Mesha Stele | |
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The Mesha Stele at the Louvre: The brown fragments are pieces of the original stele, whereas the smoother black material is Ganneau's reconstruction from the 1870s. | |
Material | Basalt |
Writing | Moabite language |
Created | c. 840 BCE |
Discovered | 1868–70 |
Present location | Louvre |
Identification | 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.[1] It is written in a variant of the Phoenician alphabet, closely related to the Paleo-Hebrew script.[2][3]
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.[4]
The Mesha Stele, the first major epigraphic Canaanite inscription found in the Southern Levant,[5] 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",[6] and history.[7] The stele, whose story parallels, with some differences, an episode in the Bible's Books of Kings (2 Kings 3:4–27), provides invaluable information on the Moabite language and the political relationship between Moab and Israel at one moment in the 9th century BCE.[3] It is the most extensive inscription ever recovered that refers to the kingdom of Israel (the "House of Omri");[8] it bears the earliest certain extrabiblical reference to the Israelite God Yahweh.[9][8] 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.[10][11][12] 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.[13]
The stele has been part of the collection of the Louvre Museum in Paris, France, since 1873.[2] Jordan has been demanding its return to its place of origin since 2014.[14]
the Moabite Stone and as the Mesha Stone / Inscription, was the first (1868) of the major epigraphic documents discovered in either Cis- or Transjordan and couched in a language closely related to Hebrew
The Meša inscription (ca. 850 BCE) clearly states that YHWH was the supreme god of Israel and of the Transjordanian territory occupied by Israel under the Omrides.
Lemaire1994
was invoked but never defined (see the help page).The earliest certain mention of the ethnonym Israel occurs in a victory inscription of the Egyptian king MERENPTAH, his well-known 'Israel Stela (ca. 1210 BCE); recently, a possible earlier reference has been identified in a text from the reign of Rameses II (see RAMESES I–XI). Thereafter, no reference to either Judah or Israel appears until the ninth century. The pharaoh Sheshonq I (biblical Shishak; see SHESHONQ I–VI) mentions neither entity by name in the inscription recording his campaign in the southern Levant during the late tenth century. In the ninth century, Israelite kings, and possibly a Judaean king, are mentioned in several sources: the Aramaean stele from Tel Dan, inscriptions of SHALMANESER III of Assyria, and the stela of Mesha of Moab. From the early eighth century onward, the kingdoms of Israel and Judah are both mentioned somewhat regularly in Assyrian and subsequently Babylonian sources, and from this point on there is relatively good agreement between the biblical accounts on the one hand and the archaeological evidence and extra-biblical texts on the other.
The Assyrian royal annals, along with the Mesha and Dan inscriptions, show a thriving northern state called Israël in the mid—9th century, and the continuity of settlement back to the early Iron Age suggests that the establishment of a sedentary identity should be associated with this population, whatever their origin. In the mid—14th century, the Amarna letters mention no Israël, nor any of the biblical tribes, while the Merneptah Stele places someone called Israël in hill-country Palestine toward the end of the Late Bronze Age. The language and material culture of emergent Israël show strong local continuity, in contrast to the distinctly foreign character of early Philistine material culture.
In fact, the conduct of the military operations and the ritual slaughter of captives is so remarkably similar to the style and ideology of biblical accounts of 'holy war' that many interpreters were at first inclined to regard the Mesha Stele as a forgery, but on paleographic grounds, its authenticity is now undisputed.