Moabite

The first big prize, discovered in 1868, was the so-called Moabite Stone, a three-foot black basalt stele with a 9th-century BCE, 34-line paleo-Hebrew inscription celebrating the Moabite King Mesha’s rebellion against the Israelites.

The drawings and script charts made by Ginsburg and other scholars who examined the original fragments, Rollston said, show “clear anomalies” in the way the Hebrew letters are formed, compared with authentic script from the period, including that on the Moabite Stone.

In 1873, after Shapira sold a large collection of newly “discovered” Moabite pottery to the German government, Clermont-Ganneau publicly denounced them — correctly — as “false from beginning to end.”

The inscriptions on the altar "are the earliest evidence we have so far for a distinctive Moabite script," Rollston told Live Science, noting that the inscription discovered in 1868 used the Hebrew script to write the Moabite language.

A 2,800-year-old inscribed stone altar, found within a Moabite sanctuary in the ancient city of Ataroth in Jordan, may shed light on an ancient biblical war.