Monolith-1 Inscriptions

The two inscriptions from Monolith-1 are currently in the British Museum. Charles Clermont-Ganneau is credited with discovering the two artifacts in 1870, though they were known to the people in Silwan. In fact, Le Comte Joseph d’Estourmel mentions that he was shown an inscription at the door of a tomb in Silwan in 1832, which may be a reference to the Royal Steward Inscription (or possibly the inscription on Monolith-3). Clermont-Ganneau published an account of how he discovered the inscriptions, along with drawings of the tomb, though he did not publish a translation. Nahman Avigad was the first to translate the inscriptions from Silwan, over 80 years after Clermont-Ganneau. Working from photographs and a plaster squeeze sent from the British Museum, Avigad was able to translate both Paleo-Hebrew inscriptions on Monolith-1 as well as the inscription on Monolith-2 that was first documented by Adolf Reifenberg.

The name of the dead in the Royal Steward Inscription was destroyed when the beam hole was cut into the tomb’s façade (probably during the Byzantine period). Only the last three letters remain, יהו- (yahu), which is a common theophoric suffix in Judahite names. In his 1953 publication, Avigad offered the possible reconstruction Shebanyahu based on a suggestion by Yigael Yadin. The identification of this royal steward with Shebna actually goes back to Clermont-Ganneau, who speculated that Monolith-1 could have been the tomb mentioned in Isaiah 22:15–19. The equation of Shebna/Shebanyahu with the royal steward of Monolith-1 is popular today, and the artifact is even referred to as the Shebna Inscription. Yet the biblical figure’s name is never spelled Shebanyahu in the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament. 

The inscription states that the royal steward is buried along with his slave-wife (אמה), though her name is never given. It is possible that her name was included in the second inscription, which is broken, though this is speculative given the state of the Shorter Inscription.