The paleographical results achieved by the Palestine Exploration Fund, when viewed by the side of the many and varied works in other departments, may seem to be small; but Mr. Deutsch, when speaking at Oxford,[35] was not wrong in desiring his hearers to count the latter, but to weigh the former. In a minaret near Nablus, immured upside down, is an inscribed slab that once belonged to a synagogue, which, though it does not seem to have been seen by Robinson, was copied by Shultz in 1844, and published by Rödiger; and again copied by Wildenbruck, and published by Blau. Finally, in 1860, it was copied and explained by Rosen, whose work left that of his predecessors far behind. Yet even he does not give all the characters, nor are they so accurately reproduced as would seem to be absolutely necessary in the case of the oldest known Samaritan monument; nor has he been able more than to conjecture as to the reading of the very beginning of the tablet. A photograph, taken under Captain Wilson, has rendered everything clear, and it turns out that, owing to the difficulty of the position in which the decipherer is necessarily placed, it was utterly impossible to perceive certain marks on the stone itself which are quite clear in the photograph. The tablet itself exhibits ten lines, the first eight of which contain the Ten Commandments, according to the Samaritan recension, in an abbreviated form. The ninth forms a portion of the celebrated Samaritan interpolation after the Ten Commandments (from Deut. xxvii. 2—7; and ix. 30)—'And it shall be on the day when ye shall pass over Jordan ... on Mount Gerizim ... and thou shalt build there an altar unto the Lord thy God.' The last line contains the formula from Exodus, of frequent use in Samaritan worship, viz., 'Arise, O Lord; return, O Lord!'[36] Another photograph gives the famous inscription on the lintel of a ruined synagogue at Kefr Birim, in Galilee, with greater clearness than is represented in M. Renan's lithograph, taken from a cast, and is even clearer than the original itself, certain blurred characters of which it was next to impossible to distinguish on the glaring white surface. The gist of the inscription is a prayer for 'peace upon this place and all the places of Israel,' and an indication of the builder's name. In addition to these, some dozens of inscriptions have been copied—in the north of Palestine by Wilson; at Jerash and in the Lebanon by Warren; and in the Haram area and elsewhere by Mr. E. H. Palmer. Ancient characters have been ferreted out, and copied from the walls of Sidon; and a seal, bearing the inscription, 'Haggai, son of Shebaniah,' and dating as far back as the Maccabean period, has been found under the buried pavement near the south-west corner of the Haram. The red-paint characters at the south-east angle of the Haram were examined by Mr. Deutsch on the spot, and pronounced to be partly letters, partly numerals, and partly special masons' or quarry signs. Some of them were recognisable at once as well-known Phœnician characters; others, hitherto unknown in Phœnician epigraphy, Mr. Deutsch had the rare satisfaction of being able to identify on absolutely undoubted antique Phœnician structures in Syria, such as the primitive sub-structures of the harbour at Sidon. Similar marks at the north-east angle afford evidence that the stones of the Haram wall were shaped at the quarry, inasmuch as the paint in one instance has run, and the trickling is upwards with reference to the present position of the stone. Evidence to the same effect is furnished by the marginal drafts, which, present no appearance of pattern or design when the wall is regarded as a whole, but only when each stone is taken by itself.
The paleographic discovery of paramount interest is that of the Moabite stone, with a memorial inscription in what is known to scholars as the 'Phœnician' character, and belonging, there is little doubt, to the first half of the ninth century b.c. In August, 1868, the Rev. F. A. Klein, a Prussian clergyman, in the service of the Church Missionary Society at Jerusalem, in the course of a journey from es-Salt to Kerak, had the good fortune to be shown this monument at Dhibân near Arnon, the old border of Moab. The stone was lying among the ruins, perfectly free and exposed to view, the inscription uppermost, and was in excellent preservation. Mr. Klein ascertained it to be one metre thirteen centimetres in height, seventy centimetres in breadth and thirty-five in thickness, rounded at the upper and lower corners,[37] and containing thirty-four lines of writing. Circumstances prevented his copying more than 'a few words from several lines at random;' and when afterwards M. Clermont-Ganneau, of the French Consulate at Jerusalem, Captain Warren, of the Palestine Exploration Fund, and others, interested themselves to obtain 'squeezes,' the Arabs resented the action of foreigners, quarrelled among themselves, and lighting a fire about the stone poured water on it and broke it to pieces. An Arab employed by M. Ganneau, who when the quarrel arose was engaged in taking a squeeze, tore off the wet impression in rags, and springing on his horse managed to escape, though not without a spear wound in his leg. Through the energy of Captain Warren and M. Ganneau better squeezes were afterwards obtained of the larger fragments, and at a later date the fragments themselves came to hand, so that of 1,000 letters which it is estimated the stone contained, 669 have been recovered.
While the materials remain imperfect, it is impossible to obtain a complete translation of the inscription, though various attempts have been made. M. Ganneau's second translation of June, 1870, differs widely from that which he put forth five months previously; but then his only copy of certain parts of the stone was certain torn rags (lambeaux frifés et chiffonnés), and his method of procedure with the fragments of the stone is thus described:—'La plus grande partie de ces morceaux, même les plus minimes, peut être mise en place facilement, en tenant compte de la correspondance horizontale et verticale des séries de caractères: il suffit de procéder comme pour déterminer la position géographique d'un point par l'intersection des lignes de longitude et de latitude.'[38] Translations have also been attempted by Professor Schlottman, of Halle, Professor Nöldeke, and in this country by Dr. Neubauer; while Mr. Deutsch has consistently asked scholars and the public to exercise patience and wait till the full materials for a translation should come to hand. The general drift of the inscription, however, is clear enough. It appears to be a contemporaneous record from the Moabite point of view of 2 Kings i. 1, set up by King Mesha, commencing with a brief record of himself and his father, commemorating warlike successes over the Israelites, explaining how he rebuilt and improved a number of well-known Moabite cities, and finishing apparently with some further reference to war. The names of Israel, Omri, Chemosh, occur up and down, and the monarch seems to have conceived himself under the special guidance of his god, who was thought to signify his will that this or that city should be attacked, and who was obeyed implicitly. Historically, therefore, the monument is interesting, since it is an unexpected record of a nation now passed away, and adds a trifle to our knowledge.
Paleographically, the stone is of far greater value, and happily of nearly as much value in its mutilated condition, as it would have been if perfect. It is the very oldest Semitic lapidary record of importance yet discovered, the most ancient specimen of the alphabetic writing still in common use amongst us—a century and a half earlier than any other inscription in the same Phœnician character, and three centuries earlier than any other such inscription of any length. Its significance in this respect is, however, only in process of being studied, and uniformity of opinion has not yet been arrived at. The names of the Hebrew letters are all significant of certain objects—aleph, bêth, gimel, daleth, for instance = ox, house, camel, door, &c.; and it has been maintained by Semitic scholars that the letters themselves were originally slight and abridged representations of the visible objects, the resemblance being more clearly seen in the older Phœnician than in the later Phœnician, the Assyrian or square character, and archaic Greek.[39] Mr. Deutsch, who was so careful in the matter of translation, was bold to express himself here, and to assert from the evidence of the Moabite stone that 'the more primitive the characters the simpler they become; not, as often supposed, the more complicated, as more in accordance with some pictorial prototype.'[40] This view is controverted by Professor Rawlinson, in the Contemporary Review for August, 1870, and, as it appears to us, successfully; for while the later characters in some instances present a greater complication to the eye, they are far simpler to the mind as soon as you imagine yourself engaged in writing them and exerting the volition separately for each stroke. 'In samech for instance, apparently the most complicated of the later letters, a gradual diminution in the number of strokes may be traced from first to last. Originally the letter was written like an early Greek xi—thus, (
), with four distinct strokes; then the four were reduced to two by changing the three horizontal bars into a zigzag, which could be written without taking the hand from the paper, and adding a vertical bar beneath it; finally, the vertical bar was attached to one end of the zigzag, and thus made a continuation of it, so that a single continuous stroke sufficed for the whole letter.... In like manner, the original zain required three distinct strokes, two horizontal and one oblique (
), which were subsequently represented by the form still in use (Z), a form producible by a single effort, without any removal of the pen from the paper.'
And so with regard to the pictorial origin of the letters. The early bêth differs from the later solely in having a pointed head instead of a rounded one. But the object which bêth was intended to represent was a tent, the earliest 'house' of pastoral man; and this had in primitive times the simple triangular form, Δ. Thus the early bêth more resembled the object than the later one. The early daleth is a simple triangle; the later has the right side of the triangle elongated, and the other two generally rounded into one. But daleth, 'door,' represented the opening of a tent, the form of which was like that of the tent, triangular. For other instances we must refer our readers to Professor Rawlinson's paper and the plate which accompanies it, merely remarking in the way of adverse criticism that the square letters of the Old Testament present a difficulty, since, while they are confessedly of later origin, such letters as bêth, gimel, zain, ain, kaph, shin, are less simple in the sense explained, than the older. The Moabite stone also throws light on the question of the time at which writing was introduced into Greece, the Greek alphabet of the earliest inscriptions (circ. b.c. 650-500) resembling that of the Moabite stone more closely than it does any later alphabet; so that Mr. Grote's opinion that letters were unknown to the Greeks of Homer's time, and Hesiod's, is in danger of being proved incorrect.
It is remarkable that a stone measuring three feet six inches in length and with thirty-four lines of writing on it should have escaped notice until the year 1868; but since Irby and Mangles visited Moab in 1809, scarcely any European traveller has passed near the spot where this monument was found; so that it has been said that the chief value of this discovery is in the prospect it affords of future successful exploration. It should be remembered that the Arabs are now aware of the price Europeans are willing to pay for such relics, and would no doubt bring others forward if they knew of any existing. Mr. E. H. Palmer, who was in the country in the spring of 1870, is probably right in his conclusion that above ground at least there does not exist another Moabite stone. But there are more fishes in the sea than have ever yet been caught; and if a few intelligent men accustomed to dealing with lawless Arabs could be sent out to Moab to conduct excavations, they might, if liberally supplied with money and other resources, obtain antiquities of great value, inscriptions possibly included. Dean Stanley points us also to 1 Sam. xv. 12, describing Saul's victory over the Amalekites, where it is said, 'Saul came to Carmel, and behold he set him up a place' (מַצִיג which is from the root נָצַג, to set, to put; in the Hiphil to make to stand, and which might be translated pillar or trophy)—the Dean points to this to show the possibility of even Jewish inscriptions coming to light.