Tel Dan Stele

In the summer of 1993, an archaeological team working at Tel Dan in northern Galilee — the biblical city of Dan at the foot of Mount Hermon — recovered a broken basalt slab from the rubble of a gate plaza. The fragment, and two further pieces found the next year, carried an Aramaic inscription celebrating a victory of a Syrian (Aramaean) king, most likely Hazael of Damascus, over two southern kings around 840 BC. The fifth line names the defeated king as "[…]ram son of […], king of Israel," and the next line names him as a king of "bytdwd" — bet-david, the House of David. Before this find, the existence of a historical King David as the founder of a Judean royal line had no direct extra-biblical attestation; some critics had argued that "David" was a literary figure invented during the exile. The Tel Dan Stele settled that argument: by the late ninth century BC, only a few generations after David himself, foreign kings already referred to the southern dynasty as the House of David. The reconstructed stele is now displayed at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem.