CONFIEMED BY RECENT DISCOVEKIES IN PALESTINE AND THE EA3T. 135 



amongst the ruins of Dliiban, one of those vanished cities 

 whose remains strew the lofty plains of Moab beyond the 

 Jordan — now the camping ground of the Bedawin Arab. 

 This monument consists of a slab or block of basalt, about 

 three and a half feet long by two feet in breadth and thick- 

 ness, bearing on one side an mscription in Phoenician charac- 

 ters, which tells its own tale regarding its origin and object. 

 The account of the discovery and ultimate rescue of this 

 unique monument is much too long to be inserted here ; but 

 of the many accounts which have been published perhaps the 

 most complete and graphic is that of Dr. Pakenham Walsh, 

 Bishop of Ossory.* It is an interesting fact that the honour of 

 first bringing this stone to the knowledge of the outer world 

 belongs to a Christian missionary, the Rev. F. Augustus 

 Klein, one of the Church Missionary Society's labourers in 

 the East. The language is almost identical with the ancient 

 Hebrew, and shows that at the period to which it belongs, 

 namely, the tenth century before Christ, the Israehtes and 

 the Moabites had a common language, as being sprung from 

 the same ancestry, though there is considerable dissimilarity 

 between the characters in which this language was inscribed 

 by the two nations, as was to be expected owing to their long 

 separation and isolation from each other. Still they bear an 

 essential relationship which may be recognised, first in the 

 number of the letters of the alphabet, which is twenty-two 

 in both cases. (Tn the Moabite mscription one of the letters 

 (Teth) is missing owing to the mutilation of the tablet ; but 

 it must have been used in the " A(t)aroth.") Second, in the 

 similarity of many of the letters themselves. Till the dis- 

 covery of the Moabite Stone the oldest alphabetic document 

 of any length with which we were acquainted was the inscrip- 

 tion on the sarcophagus of Eshmunazar, which dates back 

 about 600 B.o. But the Moabite Inscription carries us back 

 by over 300 years to an earlier period, and so we have in it the 

 most archaic form of the Phoenician alphabet. 



So far for tlie language and alphabet. We must now con- 



* The Moabite Stone, 2nd Ed., 1872 ; also Tristram, Land of Moab, 

 p. 134. A photograph of the stoue and inscription is published by the 

 Committee of the Palestine Exploration Fund. The alphabets of the 

 Phoenician inscription, as contained in the Moabite Stone and the Siloani 

 Tablet, will be found in Helps to the Study of the Bible, published by the 

 Oxford University Press, Ed. 189.3, Plate I. 



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