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The Mesha Stele (also known as the "Moabite Stone") is a stele (inscribed stone) set up around 840 BCE by King 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 describes his many building projects. It is written using the Phoenician alphabet. The stone was discovered intact by Frederick Augustus Klein, an Anglican missionary, at the site of ancient Dibon (now Dhiban, Jordan), in August 1868, who was led to it by a local Bedouin.〔Andre Lemaire ("'House of David' Restored in Moabite Inscription" ) ''Biblical Archaeology Review'' 20:03 (May/June 1994)〕 Before it could be seen by another European, the next year it was smashed by local villagers during a dispute over its ownership. A "squeeze" (a papier-mâché impression) had been obtained by a local Arab on behalf of Charles Simon Clermont-Ganneau, 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 Mesha stele is the longest Iron Age inscription ever found in the region, constitutes the major evidence for the Moabite language, and is a "corner-stone of Semitic epigraphy and Palestinian history". 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).〔 It is also one of only four known ancient inscriptions interpreted to mention the term "Israel", the others being the Merneptah Stele, the Tel Dan Stele, and the Kurkh Monolith. Although its authenticity has been disputed over the years, and some Biblical minimalists suggest the text was not historical, but a biblical allegory, the stele is regarded as genuine and historical by the vast majority of biblical archaeologists today. ==Description and discovery== The stele is a smoothed block of basalt approximately one meter tall, 60 cm wide and 60 cm thick, bearing a surviving inscription of 34 lines. On 8 February 1870, George Grove of the Palestine Exploration Fund announced the find of the stele in a letter to ''The Times'', attributing the discovery to Charles Warren. On 17 February 1870, the 24-year-old Clermont-Ganneau published the first detailed announcement of the stele in the Revue de l’Instruction Publique.〔("The Moabite Stone, With An Illustration", Palestine Exploration Fund Quarterly Statement 2.5 (1 Jan. – 31 March 1870): 169–183. )〕 This was followed a month later by a letter from Frederick Augustus Klein published in the ''Pall Mall Gazette'', describing his discovery of the stele in August 1868: In November 1869 the stele was broken by the local Bedouin tribe (the Bani Hamida) after the Ottoman government became involved in the ownership dispute. The previous year the Bani Hamida had been defeated by an expedition to Balqa led by Reşid Pasha, the Wali of Damascus. Knowing that a demand to give up the stone to the German Consulate had been ordered by the Ottomans, and finding that the ruler of Salt was about to put pressure upon them, they heated the stele in a bonfire, threw cold water upon it and broke it to pieces with boulders. A "squeeze" (a papier-mâché impression) of the full stele had been obtained just prior to its destruction. Ginsberg's translation of the official report, "Ueber die Auffindung der Moabitischen Inschrift,"〔(Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morgenländischen Gesellschaft, Bd. 24 (1870) )〕 stated that Ganneau sent an Arab named Yacoub Caravacca to obtain the squeeze as he "did not want to venture to undertake the very costly (dangerous ) journey" himself. Caravacca was injured by the local Bedouin while obtaining the squeeze, and one of his two accompanying horsemen protected the squeeze by tearing it still damp from the stone in seven fragments before escaping. Pieces of the original stele containing most of the inscription, 613 letters out of about a thousand, were later recovered and pieced together. Of the existing stele fragments, the top right fragment contains 150 letters, the bottom right fragment contains 358 letters, the middle-right contains 38, and the rest of the fragments contain 67 letters. The remainder of the stele was reconstructed by Ganneau from the squeeze obtained by Caravacca. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Mesha Stele」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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