What imperial purpose was served by deciphering the
ancient Egyptian language, for example, and then restoring to the Egyptians
knowledge of and pride in their forgotten, ancient past?
– Bernard Lewis, Islam and the West (1993)
– Bernard Lewis, Islam and the West (1993)
If you’re looking for strange and
romantic stories of discovery in the 19th century Middle East, it’s
hard to top the saga of the Mesha Stele (or Moabite Stone), one of the longest
and most significant inscriptions from the Iron Age southern Levant. The first
Westerner to discover the stele was the missionary F.A. Klein, who observed it in
1868 at the site of Dhībān (biblical Dibon) in what is now Jordan. Klein
alerted a Prussian scholar in Jerusalem, Julius Heinrich Petermann, who made
arrangements for the Berlin Museum to negotiate the stone’s purchase. Before
negotiations were finished, however, word of the discovery leaked to other scholars
in Palestine, including the Frenchman Charles Clermont-Ganneau. Clermont-Ganneau
sent two men to investigate the stele: the first to confirm its existence, the
second, named Ya‘qub Karavaca, to make a squeeze. As the story goes, while
paper was drying on the stele to make the squeeze, a fight broke out among the
Bedouin who owned the stele at the time. Karavaca was injured, and he and the two
horsemen accompanying him were barely able to ride off to safety. Before they
hurried away, one of the horsemen retrieved the paper from the stone, torn in
pieces but able to be reconstructed. But in 1869, the stone was broken into
pieces by the Bedouin, who distributed the fragments among different clans. Clermont-Ganneau
managed to locate and purchase most of the pieces, and bring them to the Louvre
where the reconstructed stele remains today.
