Tel Dan stele

The Tel Dan Stele is a fragmentary stele containing a Canaanite inscription which dates to the 9th century BCE. It is notable for possibly being the most significant and perhaps the only extra-biblical archaeological reference to the house of David.

The Tel Dan Stele was discovered in 1993 in Tel-Dan by Gila Cook, a member of an archaeological team led by Avraham Biran. Its pieces were used to construct an ancient stone wall that survived into modern times. The stele contains several lines of Aramaic, closely related to Biblical Hebrew, and historically a common language among Jews. The surviving inscription details that an individual killed Jehoram of Israel, the son of Ahab and king of the house of David. These writings corroborate passages from the Hebrew Bible, as the Second Book of Kings mentions that Jehoram is the son of an Israelite king, Ahab, by his Phoenician wife, Jezebel. Applying a Biblical viewpoint to the inscription, the likely candidate for having erected the stele is Hazael, king of Aram-Damascus (whose language would have thus been Aramaic) who is mentioned in the Second Book of Kings as having conquered the Land of Israel, though he was unable to take Jerusalem. The stele is currently on display at the Israel Museum, and is known as KAI 310.