The first piece was not dug up during a normal excavation day. On July 21, 1993, the team’s surveyor, Gila Cook, was packing up her measuring tools near the old city gate. The afternoon sun hit a dark stone sticking out of a wall. She thought she saw letters. She called Professor Avraham Biran over. When they pulled the stone free and turned it toward the light, the writing jumped out. Biran said, “Oh my God, we have an inscription!” That first piece is called Fragment A. It is about the size of a large book and has 13 lines of writing.
The stone was not standing up like a monument anymore. Long ago someone had smashed the original stele on purpose. The pieces were then used as ordinary building blocks. Fragment A was built into a wall beside a paved plaza just outside the city’s outer gate. A year later, in June 1994, two smaller pieces turned up nearby. One was found by another archaeologist, Malka Hershkowitz. The tiniest piece, only 3 inches, was found by Gila Cook again, this time used as part of a pavement. Those two small pieces fit together perfectly and are called Fragment B. How they join with the big piece is still debated by experts. Some recent high-tech photos even suggest the letters on the two groups of pieces were carved by slightly different hands, or by the same carver at different times.
Why was the stele broken? Most scholars think the Israelites recaptured Dan after the Aramean king Hazael had set the monument up to brag. When the Israelites took the city back, they smashed the enemy’s victory stone and used the pieces in new walls and floors. Some people even wonder if they put the pieces in the pavement on purpose so that everyone walking in and out of the gate would step on the old boast. The wall that held Fragment A was later destroyed when the Assyrian king Tiglath-Pileser III attacked around 733 BC, which helps date when the pieces were reused.
It was found during a careful, official excavation, not bought on the antiquities market like a lot of other artifacts. The letters are written in Old Aramaic using the Phoenician alphabet, and little dots separate the words. The original monument was probably more than a meter tall (maybe even a meter and a half) before it was smashed. Only these three fragments have ever been found. They are now catalogued as KAI 310 and kept in the
Israel Museum.
So the stele we see today is not the proud standing stone a king once set up. It is the leftover pieces of a monument that someone later tore down and turned into ordinary building material, until the sun hit one of those pieces on a July afternoon and a surveyor noticed the letters that had been waiting there for almost 2,800 years.
