native, who risked his life in the enterprise; but this cast was obtained under circumstances of so much difficulty, that it seemed at first to be valueless. It had to be torn while still moist from the stone, and was brought to M. Ganneau in seven fragments, all more or less rubbed and worn, so that the traces of the inscription were pronounced by him to be "imperceptible." Not long after, very fair paper casts of the two main fragments of the Stone (A and B) were obtained by M. Ganneau, and still better ones by Captain Warren, and the learned world was thus put in possession of about half the inscription. Finally, the two large fragments themselves, and eighteen smaller ones, were recovered by M. Ganneau from the natives, while certain morsels fell into the hands of Captain Warren, and were brought to this country.

It is from these various materials, carefully combined, that the text of the inscription will have ultimately to be reconstructed. The pillar itself will, we trust, be re-erected in Paris, the extant fragments, whether belonging to the French or to ourselves, being reunited, and cach fitted into its proper place. It will then be patent to the eye how much of the inscription has perished, and how much has been preserved to us. M. Ganneau calculates that the document originally contained about a thousand characters. Of these the large fragment (B) exhibits 358; the smaller fragment (a) 150; the next largest to this, 38; and the remaining seventeen in his possession, 67; making a total of 613; which, as he remarks, is above three-fifths of the whole. The portions of the Stone in the possession of the Palestine Exploration Society, which consist of eighteen small fragments, add the further number

of 56 letters; so that the lost letters appear to amount to no more than 331, or less than seven-twentieths of the original inscription. Many of these may be supplied by almost certain conjecture, and others will probably be recoverable from M. Ganneau's first paper cast and M. Klein's copy. Eventually, therefore, it is probable that a very fair text of the entire inscription may be obtained, in spite of the act of Vandalism which seemed at first to have rendered such a result almost impossible.

We think it rather unfortunate that, in anticipation of the ultimate result, attempts should have been made in France, in Germany, and in England,* to present the world with what are called transcripts of the entire inscription in Hebrew characters, and with translations of these transcripts. Such attempts seem to us premature. At present the only portions of the inscription whereof scholars generally have any means of judging are the two fragments A and B, which have been made accessible to them by the excellent photographs of Captain Warren's paper "squeezes," published by the Committee of the Palestine Exploration Fund. The remainder of the inscription is the ingenious restoration of a single scholar, M. Ganneau, whose method of procedure in the production of his text has never yet been explained,† and whose arrangement of his small fragments has been wholly unchecked by any second independent judgment. It may be that M. Ganneau has performed his extremely difficult task in the best possible way, absolutely without any error; and it may be that the most implicit reliance is to be placed upon his decipherment and arrangement; but of this there is at present no proof. Certainly the internal evidence of the document, as he presents it to us, is not such as to put his version beyond criticism, or to make us feel sure that he has neither misplaced any of his fragments nor misread any of their characters.

* Besides M. Clermont-Ganneau, the following Semitic scholars have either edited or translated the inscription of Mesha: in Germany, MM. Nöldeke and Schlottmann; in England, M. Neubauer. M. E. Deutsch has wisely declined to translate it until the disjecta membra are all fitted into place.

† We should have been glad if M. Ganneau had given us fac-similes of his fragments separately, or, at any rate, an account of the contents of each fragment, and had informed us whether or no he finds the fragments of the Stone fit into each other, like the parts of a puzzle. Again, we should have liked to have been told whether the original paper cast of the Stone, which is the only extant representation of the monument in its entirety, is found to be as indecipherable as M. Ganneau at first declared it, or whether it is mainly by following its guidance that he puts the fragments in their places. At present we can find no account of M. Ganneau's method of procedure but the following, which is, we confess, to us quite unintelligible :-"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.”—Revue Archéologique, Juin, p. 358.

But while the complete text of the inscription, and therefore its full purport, are in our judgment still matters of doubt, its general character and its date, within certain rather narrow limits, seem to us fixed with an approach to certainty from the portions of the document preserved to us in the two large fragments. The fragment A contains the commencement of the inscription, and makes it perfectly clear that the monument was erected by a certain "Mesha, King of Moab," and spoke of a recent war waged between Moab and two, or more, kings of Israel. Now, as Israel ceased to be a kingdom about B.C. 721, the document must evidently be anterior to that date. This being the case, and a war between a "Mesha, King of Moab," and the kingdom of Israel being recorded in Scripture (2 Kings i. 1; iii. 4—27), at the distance of about a century and a half before B.C. 721, there seems to be no reasonable ground for doubting that the "Mesha" of the inscription is the same as the "Mesha of Scripture, the only king of that name known to have reigned over Moab. This conclusion is confirmed by an indication, which this portion of the inscription contains, of the name of one of the kings of Israel who fought against Moab. In the place (line 5) where the expression "King of Israel" first occurs, and where we should look, therefore, to have (if anywhere) the name of the Israelite monarch,* the character immediately preceding the first letter of "king" (melek), and which should therefore be the last letter of the king's name, is i. Now the letter i is not the terminal letter of the name of any of the later kings of Israel, but only of the three early kings, Zimri, Tibni, and Omri. But of these three names, one, viz., Omri, occurs beyond a doubt in another fragment of the inscription; and we are thus led to conclude as almost certain that the wellknown Omri, the founder of Samaria (1 Kings xvi. 16—28; Mic. vi. 16), and his son Ahab, are the kings of Israel intended in the early part of the document. Thus its date is fixed to the earlier half of the ninth century before our era;† and it may be taken as illustrating very satisfactorily the hostile relations between Israel and Moab described in Scripture as existing at this period.

The illustration, however, is general, not special; incidental, not

Sir H. Rawlinson was the first to point out this probability, and to suggest that the name Omri immediately preceded Melek Israel in this place. (See the Athenæum of February 26, p. 296.) This conjecture has now been accepted by M. Ganneau, the Count de Vogué, and others. M. Ganneau even states that on the fragment which he places at the close of line 4, where he originally ready, the true reading may be », so that only one letter would be wanting at the end of line 4 to complete the name of Omri (y). See the Revue Archéologique for June, 1870, p. 362.

The numbers of the present Hebrew text, calculated by the reigns of the kings of Judah, give B.C. 897 as the last year of Ahab; calculated by the reigns of the kings of Israel, they give B.C. 877. The chronology of the Assyrian canon would bring down the date to about B.C. 857.

express or direct. The campaigns recorded by Mesha are not those on which the Biblical writers lay stress (2 Kings iii. 4-27; 2 Chron. xx. 1—25), but certain previous campaigns, which are either wholly omitted in the Scriptural narrative, or are there touched with the utmost brevity (see 2 Kings i. 1). The case thus rather resembles that of the Assyrian inscriptions of the same date, which mention casually Ahab, Hazael, and Benhadad, than that of the more important inscriptions of later Assyria and of Egypt, containing the heathen account of wars which the sacred writers have made the direct subject of their narrative. Considered, therefore, as an evidence confirming the truth of the Hebrew Scriptures, the value of the inscription is slight, though it is not altogether nugatory. Some years back it might properly enough have been hailed with acclamations, as a testimony to the plain historic truth of a narrative which many were seeking to resolve into mere myth and fable. Now that the great inscriptions of Sheshonk and Sennacherib have been deciphered and published, it has only a minor value, since those documents directly confirm and illustrate the Biblical narrative, while this throws light on it only indirectly.

Considered as a fresh contribution to history, the interest of the document is also slight, though here, too, it is not without a certain value. We learn from it several facts not contained in the Scriptural narrative as that Omri and Ahab were regarded as cruel oppressors of Moab; that the Moabite cities were destroyed or fell into decay under their rule, and required to be rebuilt; that hostilities between the two kingdoms began as early as Ahab's time; and that Mesha, having established his independence, restored the towns throughout his dominions, and fixed his capital at Dibon,† where he set up the recently-discovered monument. Further, we have evidence that the Moabites regarded themselves, not only as under the special protection, but as under the actual direction, of their god, Chemosh, who was thought to signify his will that this or that city should be attacked, and was obeyed implicitly. It is probable that, when the whole inscription has been put finally into shape, some other facts, similar in their general character to these, may be made out; but it is tolerably clear that nothing is likely to be recovered of any deeper or wider interest.

On the whole, therefore, we must pronounce the historic importance of the "Moabite Stone" to be not very great-at any rate, not to be comparable with that of numerous Assyrian, Babylonian,

* The restoration of the towns is the principal subject of fragment B.

+ Dibon is mentioned in Scripture as a Moabite town (Num. xxi. 30, Isa. xv. 2, Jer. xlviii. 18-24), though not as the capital, which seems generally to have been Kir-Heres, called sometimes Kir-Moab. (Compare Isa. xv. 1, xvi. 7, 11, Jer. xlviii. 31 and 36.)

Egyptian, and Persian monuments recovered during the last twenty years without any great stir being made about them. It is not as an historic document that we have wished to call attention to the "Stone," or as such that we should have considered it a fitting subject for an article. To us its predominant interest seems to lie altogether on its linguistic side-to consist in the light which is thrown by it on Semitic grammar and on Palæography. It is in connection with the latter subject that the document seems to us of paramount importance; and we propose, in the remaining space at our disposal, to confine ourselves to this aspect of the recent discovery.

We have said that the moment a copy of a small portion of the inscription was obtained by M. Klein, it was seen at once that the writing was "Phoenician."* This is palpable to any one in the least acquainted with the Phoenician character; and a glance at the alphabets represented on the accompanying plate † (of which Nos. 2, 3, and 4 are undoubtedly Phoenician) will probably be enough to satisfy upon the point even the most sceptical inquirer. Now Phoenician writing is that from which the Greek, the Roman, and the other European alphabets were derived, so that all inquiries on

The term "Phoenician," which has been applied generally to this class of writing, is not altogether a happy one, since there is no reason to believe that the character in question was at all peculiar to the Phoenician people. Rather the evidence goes to show that it was common to all the races of Western Asia from Egypt to the foot of the Taurus, and from the Mediterranean to Nineveh. The character is found to have been in use at Nineveh itself, in Phoenicia, at Jerusalem and Samaria, in the Moabite country, in Cilicia, and in Cyprus. M. Deutsch has proposed to substitute for Phoenician," as the designation of this mode of writing, the term "Cadmean."

† A few words of explanation as to the plate itself, and the authorities upon which it rests, appear to be desirable. The plate represents, in its first four lines, the Phoenician or Cadmean alphabet, in four stages, arranged chronologically. Line 1 gives the characters as they exist upon the Moabite Stone. The forms have been traced over photographs of the paper casts sent to England by Captain Warren, or else copied from plaster casts (now in Oxford) of certain small fragments of the actual Stone. Line 2 gives the characters as they appear upon certain Assyrian tablets and gems, which are assigned by Sir H. Rawlinson to the period between Tiglath-pileser II. and Asshur-banipal, or to about B.C. 745-650. These characters have not been copied from the tablets themselves, but are taken from the fac-similes published by Sir H. Rawlinson in the Journal of the Asiatic Society for the year 1865. Line 3 represents the characters as they are believed to exist on the sarcophagus of Eshmunazar (supposed date about B.C. 600), which is now at Paris. It reproduces the forms from the copy of them published by Dietrich in the year 1855. Line 4 gives the ordinary Phoenician alphabet of Persian, Greek, and Roman times. It is taken mainly from the Scripturæ linguæque Phænicia monumenta of Gesenius, but with some corrections from other sources. remainder of the plate exhibits the forms of the most archaic Greek writing. These forms are exhibited solely as they occur when the writing is from right to left, for the sake of comparison with the Phoenician forms, though even in the most ancient inscriptions of Greece the writing is often either ẞoverpopηdòv or from left to right, and the letters thus often face the other way. The authorities followed for the forms are chiefly Böckh and Rose, though sometimes inedited inscriptions existing in the British Museum have been made use of.

The