ABSTRACT
In 1868, a German missionary discovered, among the ruins in the Biblical land of Moab on the east side of the Dead Sea, and at the site of the ancient city of Dion, almost directly opposite En-Gedi, a stele made of black basalt, three and a half feet tall and two feet thick, with an inscription in the Moabite dialect that differed very little from Old Hebrew. An impression of it was taken by a young French archaeologist, Charles-Simon Clermont-Ganneau, who was attached to the Jerusalem consulate. It proved to be an account, in the name of the Moabite King Mesha, of his war, in the ninth century, with the Israelites east of the Jordan, which is recounted in II Kings 3. When the Arabs of that locality found the foreigners taking such an interest in the stone, they concluded, as the modern Bedouins have done in connection with the Dead Sea scrolls, that there must be treasure involved. They broke the stele open, but Clermont-Ganneau collected the fragments and put it together again. It is now to be seen in the Louvre and is generally known as the Moabite Stone. It presumably dates from the time of Mesha.
