Mesha Stele

A slab of dark basalt, smoothed and rounded at the top, carries 34 lines cut in a Phoenician-type alphabet close to Paleo-Hebrew script, giving the voice of King Mesha of Moab in the mid-ninth century BCE. Published measurements differ, ranging from about a metre to 124 cm in height. Speaking in the first person, Mesha explains that Chemosh, god of Moab, let Omri of Israel and his son dominate the land, then helped him retake Ataroth, Nebo and Jahaz. The text lists fortifications, a palace and reservoirs, then a war against Horonaim; its final lines are lost. Line 18 names YHWH, the earliest secure mention of that god outside the Bible. Roughly 613 of about a thousand letters survive on the stone; the rest is restored from a paper impression.

The stele marked a sanctuary to Chemosh at Qarho, the citadel of Mesha's capital Dibon. The missionary Frederick Augustus Klein was shown it intact at Dhiban in August 1868 by Sattam Al-Fayez, and France, Britain and Germany soon competed for it. For Charles Simon Clermont-Ganneau, Yacoub Caravacca took a papier-mâché squeeze, pulled off still damp in seven pieces as his party escaped. In November 1869 the Bani Hamida, pressed by Ottoman officials to surrender the stone for Germany, heated it, doused it with cold water and smashed it. Clermont-Ganneau published the first detailed notice on 17 February 1870 and later reassembled the recovered fragments guided by the squeeze. Readings are still argued: André Lemaire restored House of David in line 31 in 1994; Israel Finkelstein, Nadav Na'aman and Thomas Römer proposed Balak in 2019; Michael Langlois sided with Lemaire.

The narrative runs alongside 2 Kings 3:4–27, which also has Moab rebel against Israel but compresses the conflict into one coalition campaign and adds Mesha's sacrifice of his son, absent from the stone. If Lemaire is right, the Tel Dan Stele supplies the matching Aramaean reference to David's dynasty. With the Merneptah Stele and one of the Kurkh Monoliths, these two form the four known contemporaneous inscriptions naming Israel. A fragment found at Karak in 1958 carries a similar text on the same events. Around 1870 the discovery also set off a run of forged Moabite objects, known as the Moabitica.