The Mesha Stela is one of the most fascinating archaeological pieces related to the Bible. It is a black basalt stela, erected around 840 BC. C., which contains a long inscription (thirty-four lines) in the Moabite language and paleo-Hebrew alphabet, very similar to the Phoenician one. In it, King Mesha of Moab, a small kingdom in Transjordan, boasted of having freed his country from the yoke imposed on them by King Omri of Israel. Likewise, it referred to the looting of valuable cult objects from a sanctuary of Yahweh in Nebo.
However, beyond the content of the stele, the truth is that its discovery constitutes one of the most bizarre and unfortunate episodes of all those related to biblical archaeology. This is the story.
The German missionary Frederick A. Klein was the first Westerner to see the Mesha stela. Klein had resided in Jerusalem since the year 1851. He had been sent there by the Church Missionary Society, in order to Christianize the Muslims of Palestine. Within the framework of his missionary work, in 1868 he made a trip through Transjordan that took him, among other places, to Dhiban, where he arrived on August 19.
There he was received by the sheikh of the Banî Hamîdi Bedouin tribe, who told him about a black stone with a strange inscription. Intrigued, Klein accepted the sheikh's invitation, and went to the place where the stela was found. Although he had no knowledge of the languages and scripts of the ancient East, Klein was able to sense the importance of the piece, and copied some of the lyrics. The possibility of taking the stela to Jerusalem was not raised, however.
Years later, in view of the fatal fate that awaited the monument, some voices, such as that of the explorer Richard Burton, reproached him for his decision. Klein defended himself by stating that the Banî Hamîdi would never have allowed him to take it away.
At the end of August, already back in Jerusalem, Klein reported his discovery to the Prussian consul, Julius Henry Petermann. Convinced that it was an ancient Phoenician inscription, Petermann applied to the Royal Museum in Berlin for the necessary funds to purchase it. The museum responded in the affirmative, and awarded him a total of one hundred Napoleons. Thereupon, Klein and Petermann planned their buying strategy and agreed to keep the discovery secret, in order to avoid possible meddling by other European powers.
In March 1869, Petermann sent Sâbâ Qa'war, a trusted Arab collaborator, to negotiate the purchase with the Banî Hamîdi. However, the mission was a failure. Upon verifying the interest of the Germans in the piece, the Bedouins not only decided to hide it to prevent it from being stolen, but also valued it at a thousand Napoleons, a figure beyond Petermann's reach.
Despite the pact of silence that Klein and Petermann had reached, the news about the discovery of the stele spread without remedy. Thus, for example, the orientalist Charles Simon Clermont-Ganneau, translator for the French consul in Jerusalem, not only knew of its existence, but also claimed the merit of being considered its discoverer. In this sense, he maintained that, although he had never seen it, he had heard about it long before Klein saw it in Dhiban.
What is beyond dispute is that we owe to Clermont-Ganneau the fact that, at present, we know practically the entirety of the inscription. And it is that, from the beginning, he was interested in obtaining a carbon copy of the piece in order to better understand its nature, and thus convince the French authorities to enter into competition with the Prussians when acquiring it. In this way, he sent a delegation to Dhiban, made up of three of his collaborators of Arab origin, so that, with the permission of the sheikh of the banî hamîdi, they could proceed with the tracing.
However, when they were almost finished, a violent dispute broke out between the members of the tribe, for reasons that have not been clarified. Two of Clermont-Ganneau's envoys fled the scene in haste, one of them suffering a spear wound to the leg. More heroic was the performance of the third envoy, who, in the midst of the tumult, dared to throw himself into the hole in which the stele was hidden, picked up the still-damp tracing of the inscription, saved it and fled at full speed with his horse. Thanks to that courageous action, today we can see practically the entire inscription.
Another of the characters who learned of the discovery was the British soldier Charles Warren, famous for his excavations in Jerusalem. Although Warren was aware of Klein and Petermann's attempts to purchase the stele, he contacted the Palestine Exploration Fund and the British Museum to notify them of the find and to see if they were interested in purchasing it. So what Klein and Petermann feared most had finally happened. Prussia, England, and France were to compete for the purchase of the stele.
The truth is that Prussia maintained its advantage. In mid-October 1869, Sâbâ Qa'war appeared at the German embassy in Jerusalem, announcing that the Banî Hamîdi had finally agreed to sell the piece in exchange for one hundred and twenty Napoleons. The new Prussian consul, Von Alten, immediately accepted the new figure, and decided to contribute the additional twenty Napoleons himself.
However, just as it seemed certain that the stele would end up on display in a Berlin museum, a new and unexpected problem arose. The sheikh of a rival banî hamîdi tribe prohibited the piece from being transported through his territory. To try to overcome that difficulty, the Prussians asked the pashas of Jerusalem and Nablus to straighten out the situation. And then disaster struck.
At the end of November 1869 the first news about the destruction of the stele reached Jerusalem. According to the official version, the pasha of Nablus forced the Banî Hamîdi to deliver the piece to the Prussian delegation. This interference by the Ottoman authorities deeply offended the Bedouins, who were sworn enemies of the pasha.
The Bedouins not only chose to disobey his orders, but on top of that, they decided to destroy the piece to prevent any Ottoman interference in their affairs. Thus, they heated the stela with fire and, immediately afterwards, they threw cold water on it, which caused it to break into dozens of fragments.
There is, however, a second version of the event, according to which the Banî Hamîdi believed that Western interest in the stele was due to the fact that it possessed some kind of magical power related to fertility. Hence, they destroyed it and distributed the fragments among the family heads of the tribe, who kept them in their barns, convinced that this would bring them prosperity and abundance. In any case, whatever the cause of the destruction, the truth is that the disaster was already irremediable... wasn't it?
Once von Alten and Klein confirmed that the stele had been destroyed, they lost all interest in the matter. Instead, Warren and Clermont-Ganneau began a detailed investigation into the ultimate fate of the various fragments, hoping to eventually reconstruct the piece. For that purpose they mobilized their Arab contacts to the Dhiban region, so that they bought as many fragments of the stele as possible.
The disagreements between Warren and the Palestine Exploration Fund favored Clermont-Ganneau being the one who managed to buy the largest and most valuable fragments. In March 1870 Warren left Jerusalem, and the Palestine Exploration Fund decided to hand over the eighteen fragments Warren had recovered to the French.
In the end, this joint work allowed us to gather more than fifty fragments, which accounted for approximately two thirds of the inscription. The rest is known only thanks to the tracing carried out by the envoys from Clermont-Ganneau shortly before the destruction of the monument. That tracing was the one that allowed an almost total reconstruction of the stele, as it can still be admired today in the Louvre Museum. Despite everything, considering the course of events, the end result could have been much worse.
In October 2014, Daifallah Hdeithat, president of the Mesha Center for Studies and Human Rights, sent a letter to the French ambassador in the Jordanian capital demanding the return of the Mesha stele. Faced with such a request, the ambassador limited himself to informing that he would send the letter to those responsible for the Louvre Museum, while he recalled that diplomatic relations between France and Jordan were based on international agreements that must be respected.
Dissatisfied by that response, in April 2016, Hdeithat requested permission from the governor of Amman to send a second letter to the French ambassador, insisting on the need to initiate the relevant procedures, considering that it was one of the most valuable pieces. of the Jordanian archaeological heritage, which had been sent to France irregularly in 1873.
“The Mesha stele is a symbol of the power and greatness of the country and its people, and it belongs to Jordan,” Hdeithat told The Jordan Times newspaper. Despite Hdeithat's initiative, the stela remains in the Louvre.
This text is part of an article published in number 644 of the Historia y Vida magazine. Do you have something to contribute? Write to us at redaccionhyv@historiayvida.com.
