Siloam Inscription

Siloam inscription

The inscription in its current location
Material	Stone
Writing	Paleo-Hebrew
Created	c. 700 BCE
Discovered	1880
Present location	Istanbul Archaeology Museums
Identification	2195 T

The Siloam inscription or Shiloah inscription (כתובת השילוח) or Silwan inscription is a passage of inscribed text found in the Siloam tunnel which brings water from the Gihon Spring to the Pool of Siloam, located in the City of David in East Jerusalem neighborhood of Shiloah or Silwan. The inscription records the construction of the tunnel, which has been dated to the 8th century BCE on the basis of the writing style. It is the only known ancient inscription from the wider region which commemorates a public construction work, despite such inscriptions being commonplace in Egyptian and Mesopotamian archaeology.

It is among the oldest extant records of its kind written in Hebrew using the Paleo-Hebrew alphabet, a regional variant of the Phoenician alphabet.

The inscription is at permanent exhibition at the Istanbul Archaeology Museum.

The tunnel was discovered in 1838 by Edward Robinson. Despite the tunnel being examined extensively during the 19th century by Robinson, Charles Wilson, and Charles Warren, they all missed discovering the inscription, probably due to the accumulated mineral deposits making it barely noticeable. According to Easton's Bible Dictionary, in 1880 a youth (Jacob Eliahu, later Jacob Spafford) wading up the tunnel from the Siloam Pool end discovered the inscription cut in the rock on the eastern side, about 19 feet into the tunnel. The inscription was surreptitiously cut from the wall of the tunnel in 1891 and broken into fragments which were recovered through the efforts of the British Consul in and placed in the Istanbul Archaeology Museum.