Artifact
Siloam Inscription
c. 700 BC
One of the most important ancient Hebrew inscriptions ever found, offering a dramatic firsthand account of the engineering feat described in 2 Kings 20:20. Its elegant prose demonstrates the high level of Hebrew literacy in Hezekiah's Judah and confirms the biblical account of the tunnel's construction.
About this artifact
Discovered in 1880 by a student named Jacob Eliahu, who slipped while wading through the Siloam Tunnel in Jerusalem and noticed carved letters on the tunnel wall about six meters from the southern exit. The paleo-Hebrew inscription, consisting of six lines carved into a prepared panel, vividly describes the moment two teams of tunnelers working from opposite ends heard the sound of each other's picks and broke through the rock to meet. It is one of the oldest known monumental Hebrew inscriptions and provides a rare first-person account of ancient engineering. The inscription was chiseled out of the tunnel wall by vandals in 1891 and recovered in fragments; it now resides in the Istanbul Archaeological Museum.
