Mesha Stele

The Mesha Stele, also called the Moabite Stone, is a basalt inscription commissioned around 840 BC by King Mesha of Moab, set up to commemorate his throwing off Israelite domination and his building works across his kingdom, east of the Dead Sea in present-day Jordan. Written in Moabite, a Northwest Semitic language extremely close to biblical Hebrew and recorded in a variant of the Phoenician alphabet, the thirty-four-line inscription names the god Chemosh, describes Mesha's military campaigns against Israelite-held towns, and, on one widely discussed but partially damaged line, contains what many scholars read as the earliest extra-biblical reference to the "House of David." Discovered in 1868 at Dhiban, Jordan, the stone was deliberately shattered in a dispute over its removal before a full squeeze (paper impression) had been taken, though the surviving fragments and the earlier squeeze allowed most of the text to be reconstructed. It is among the most important non-biblical sources for the history of ancient Israel, Judah and Moab and has been held by the Louvre since 1873.