Mesha Stele

The Mesha Stele — also called the Moabite Stone — was found by a German missionary in 1868 at Dhiban, east of the Dead Sea in modern Jordan. It is a stout slab of black basalt about a metre tall, inscribed in 34 lines of an early Moabite script very close to Hebrew. King Mesha of Moab tells, in the first person, how the god Chemosh had been angry with his land and given it into the hand of Omri king of Israel, but how Chemosh then restored Moab through Mesha's campaigns — exactly the war narrated from the Israelite side in 2 Kings 3. Two details make the stone famous. First, it names the kingdom of Israel and "Omri king of Israel" by name, a generation after Omri's death. Second, in line 18, it mentions "the vessels of YHWH" — the earliest known occurrence of the divine name Yahweh outside the Bible. A century later, a re-examination of an even earlier badly damaged line proposed (controversially) a reading of "House of David" as well. The original is now displayed in the Louvre.