is the mesha inscription a forgery

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Is the Mesha Inscription a Forgery?Author(s): W. F. AlbrightSource: The Jewish Quarterly Review, New Series, Vol. 35, No. 3 (Jan., 1945), pp. 247-250Published by: University of Pennsylvania PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1452186Accessed: 11/11/2010 07:04

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IS THE MESHA INSCRIPTION A FORGERY?

By W. F. ALBRIGHT

The John Hopkins University

IN THEhistory

ofscholarship

there isalways

room forthe work of the ruthless surgeon who cuts away diseasedtissue and frees learning from accumulated errors and

spurious documents. Often the surgeon goes too far, as inthe case of Alfred von Gutschmidt and the youthfulscience of Assyriology, or of Ales HrdliEka and Pleistoceneman in America. Yet it can scarcely be denied that the

criticisms of these men were of great value in compellingthe adoption of much more rigid standards of research.Had the scholars in question applied the same rigorouscriteria to their own investigation of the problems at issuethat they required of their antagonists, they would not

themselves have been subsequently discredited, as has

actually been the case. When Richard Bentley disprovedthe authenticity of the Letters of Phalaris, it was accomp-lished with all the convincing weight of authority imposed

by the arguments of the foremost critical student of classical

antiquity in his day. After v. Gutschmidt and N6ldeke

had disproved the authenticity of Ibn Wahshiya's Naba-

taean Agriculture, nothing was left to be said in its favor,

however useful the work may prove to be for the light itsheds on the forger's own times. Clermont-Ganneau's

proof of the falsity of the Moabite Antiquities and the

alleged archetype of Deuteronomy was made once for all.

Dr. A. S. Yahuda contributed a very useful item to the

long list of such exposures when he demonstrated many

years ago that the Samaritan Book of Joshua was not247



THE JEWISH QUARTERLY REVIEW

ancient but medieval, contrary to the previously expressedviews of Moses Gaster. His success was due to the factthat he brought to the critical task incomparably bettercontrol of Arabic language, literature and history thanwas possessed by his adversary. No scholar, however,can safely undertake a task of this nature unless he is bothmore critical and better informed than his predecessors inthe field. Yahuda should have remembered this when heundertook in the last number of the Jewish QuarterlyReview (XXXV, pp. 139-164) to prove that the MeshaStone is a forgery. Forgetting or neglecting this truism,he has not only failed completely but has exposed himselfto justified charges of approaching a question of this kindwith an arbitrary parti pris.

In the first place, no inscription of comparable age wasthen known, and it would, accordingly, have been impos-sible for the greatest scholar of the day to have divined thetrue forms of characters in use in the third quarter of theninth century B. C. E. The Mesha Stone was first seen insitu by a German Protestant missionary of excellent repute,in 1868. The

following yearClermont-Ganneau had a

partialcopy and a squeeze made of it before the Arabs broke it.In 1870 he obtained possession of the fragments for trans-mission to the Louvre. It is very easy to determine theexact state of knowledge at that time by examining Schr6-der's handbook, Die phonizische Sprache, and Levy'smonograph, Siegel und Gemmen, both of which appeared

in 1869. No lapidary Hebrew or Canaanite inscriptionantedating the sixth century (reign of Psammetichus II)was then known, aside from the still unintelligible Nora andBosa inscriptions and a few Old-Hebrew seals which couldnot then be dated at all. Since the forms of characters

changed rapidly between cir. 900 and cir. 590 B. C. E.,there was thus no possible way of knowing what the al-

248



IS MESHA INSCRIPTION A FORGERY?-ALBRIGHT 249

phabet of Mesha's time might be. Now we have manyinscriptions dating from between cir. 850 and 750 B. C. E.,some of which, like the nearly contemporary stele ofKilamuwa of Sham'al, the Hazael inscription from Arslan

Tash, and the Ben-hadad stele, resemble the Mesha Stone

very closely in script. Some of the forms of characters hadnot then been found in any documents. It was thus

humanly impossible for the Mesha Stone to be forged.Incidentally, it is a beautifully made and inscribed steleof hard basalt, a metre high, as different as possible fromthe wretched Moabite forgeries of the notorious rogue,Selim el-Qari. How very bad was his own copy of severallines of the Moabite Stone in 1869 may be seen from the

reproduction given by Clermont-Ganneau on p. 159 of hislittle book, Les fraudes archeologiques en Palestine (1885).Selim's high opinion of his own artistic and draughtingability, quoted by Yahuda, is wholly without basis.

No one who rereads the reports of Clermont-Ganneau,

Socin, and others can be in any doubt about the utterlyunreliable character of the icon-painter and antiquity

dealer, Selim el-Qari, whose own supporters admitted thathe was "ein notorischer Schurke," and whose lies and

falsifications were later established beyond doubt. Anyisndd based on him is, accordingly, worthless; it is a shame

to waste paper by reproducing such lies and innuendos.

Incidentally, Yahuda's own statement swarms with in-

accuracies: Selim never made a cast for Clermont-Ganneau,but only a partial copy; the famous American consul and

biblical archaeologist, Selah Merrill, appears as Phila

Merrill (p. 142); Sellm's surname, el Qari (which can refer

only to his ancestral home in some such place as the Chris-

tian town of Qarah between Damascus and HIums cf.Yaqut-

Wiistenfeld, IV, pp. 12 f., for the orthography, and note

that Qadr nd Qdrah, from the topographical designations



THE JEWISH QUARTERLY REVIEW

qdr and qarah, respectively, are not uncommon place-names]), is said to have been given him as "the reader" bythe Bedouins, who were impressed by his skill in decipher-ment (!). There are numerous other points which requirecorrection, but no further space should be wasted on

correcting a narrative reflecting the author's rather cloudedrecollection of events which transpired several decades ago.

The rest of Yahuda's essay is devoted to criticisms ofthe content of the Mesha Stone. Contrary to all scholarlypractice, he cites most of the protagonists of its inauthenti-

city, without mentioning any serious study of it since 1896.Thus he fails absolutely to refer to the excellent studies byLidzbarski, Cooke and Dussaud, on which cf. Dussaud's

bibliography in his Monuments palestiniens et judaiques(1912), p. 20. In his repetition of previous criticisms ofthe language of the Stone, Yahuda refers only to Aramaicand Arabic parallels, without even hinting at the existenceof innumerable subsequently discovered parallels in North-west-Semitic documents of comparable age. The formswith infixed t against which he protests, are also found in the

slightly early inscriptionsfrom

Byblus,not to mention

the still earlier Ugaritic tablets or a number of place-namesfrom Western Palestine. The plural and dual in nuninstead of mem can be illustrated from a number ofNorthwest-Semitic districts in the second millennium. Suchforms as nw "year," have been found in the Ostraca of

Samaria, proving that they were characteristic of North

Israelite as well as of Moabite. And, most significant of all,the orthography corresponds (outside of a few place-names, etc.) exactly to the spelling of the slightly laterOstraca of Samaria. The list might be prolonged over

many pages; the foregoing illustrations are only samples.The Moabite Stone remains a corner-stone of Semitic epig-raphy and Palestinian history.

250

is the mesha inscription a forgery

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