Mesha Stele

The Mesha Stele (also known as the "Moabite Stone") is a stele (inscribed stone) set up around 840 BCE by Mesha of Moab (a kingdom located in modern Jordan). Mesha tells how Kemosh, the God of Moab, had been angry with his people and had allowed them to be subjugated to Israel, but at length Kemosh returned and assisted Mesha to throw off the yoke of Israel and restore the lands of Moab. Mesha then describes his many building projects.

The stone was discovered intact by a missionary at the site of ancient Dibon (now Dhiban, Jordan), in August 1868. The next year it was smashed by local villagers during a dispute over its ownership, but a "squeeze" (a papier-mâché impression) had been obtained, and fragments containing most of the inscription (613 letters out of about a thousand) were later recovered and pieced together. The squeeze and the reassembled stele are now in the Louvre Museum.

The stele, whose story parallels, with some differences, an episode in the bible's Books of Kings (2 Kings 3:4-8), provides invaluable information on the Moabite language and the political relationship between Moab and Israel at one moment in the 9th century BCE. It is the most extensive inscription ever recovered that refers to the kingdom of Israel (the "House of Omri"), it bears the earliest certain extra-biblical reference to the Israelite god Yahweh, and, if French scholar André Lemaire's reconstruction of a portion of line 31 is correct, the earliest mention of the "House of David" (i.e., the kingdom of Judah).