Researchers have verified with a considerable degree of certainty that the Mesha Stele – a basalt stone slab discovered in 1868 east of the Dead Sea – contains explicit references to Dovid Hamelech.
Also named the Moabite Stone, it has provided historians and linguists with the largest source of the Moabite language to date – an extinct dialect of the Canaanite languages, themselves a branch of Northwest Semitic languages formerly spoken in the region described in the Bible as Moab, or modern-day western Jordan, in the early 1st millennium BC.
The stele currently resides in the Louvre museum in Paris, France. While it was damaged in 1869, a paper mache impression of the inscription was captured before the damage occurred.
The slab is etched with a lengthy account of King Mesha of Moav going to war with Klal Yisroel. It describes events that correspond with a similar account in Melachim II, Perek 3, including allusions to the “House of Dovid” and the “Altar of Dovid.”
However, scholars could not be entirely sure that such references to Dovid Hamelech were being correctly deciphered. Until now.
In an article titled “Mesha’s Stele and the House of David” published in the Biblical Archeology Review, researchers Andre Lemaire and Jean-Philippe Delorme re-examined the evidence, explain how digital photographs were taken in 2015 of both the “restored stela and the paper squeeze.”
“The team used a method called Reflectance Transformation Imaging… this method is especially valuable because the digital rendering allows researchers to control the lighting of an inscribed artifact, so that hidden, faint, or worn incisions become visible,” they wrote.
Thus, researchers were able to glean a much clearer picture of the ancient records. i24 News
“paper mache”
That would be “papier-mâché”?