Milton C. Fisher
The pioneer explorations at Jerusalem by the British Army engineers Charles Wilson and Charles Warren were followed up, as you may recall, by a French foreign service official named Charles Clermont-Ganneau. After he studied ancient oriental languages in preparation for a civil service post in the Near East, the young Frenchman spent a short while at the consulate in Constantinople, but was soon transferred to the Turkish province of Palestine. That was in 1867 — at the tender age of 21. By the time he was 23 his name would be known to everyone involved in Biblical research or interested in Near Eastern antiquities.
It was the spectacular “catch” he made on the heels of another man’s discovery that called the attention of the directors of the Palestine Exploration Fund to this young Frenchman and led him to embark upon a remarkably successful career as an archaeologist. For in 1869 Clermont-Ganneau became the reclaimer of a prize ninth century BC inscription, a three and a quarter foot high basalt stele which has direct bearing on the Biblical record.
The whole story is dramatic. It begins with the extremely close tie this Moabite inscription of king Mesha holds to the Bible text itself. Its language and script are so similar to Hebrew that it was instantly recognized and translated. The Bible says, “Now Mesha king of Moab was a sheepbreeder, and he regularly paid the king of Israel 100,000 lambs and the wool of 100,000 rams. But it happened, when Ahab died, that the king of Moab rebelled against the king of Israel” (2 Kgs 3:4–5). The Moabite stone puts it this way: “I am Mesha, son of Chemosh, king of Moab, the Dibonite.. .. As for Omri, king of Israel, he humbled Moab
Clermont-Ganneau, still in shock, bargains with the Bedouin over the fragmented Moabite Stone.
BSP 4:1 (Winter 1991) p. 3
many years.. .. And his [grand-]son. .. also said ‘I will humble Moab.’ In my time he spoke thus, but I have triumphed over him and over his house. . .”a
Clermont-Ganneau hastened to Dhiban (ancient Dibon), Jordan, upon hearing that a German missionary pastor, Rev. F. A. Klein, had spotted an ancient inscribed stone there and that the bedouin Arabs were anticipating a fortune. By the time our Frenchman made his second trip to Dhiban with funds from Paris, thanks to his resourcefulness in sending home a “squeeze” (paper impression) of the text, he found to his horror the locals had fractured the stone. Now possessors of some 20 fragments, they could each demand payment. Yet he successfully procured and shipped the reconstructed stele to the Louvre Museum.
It was this achievement that prompted the British Palestine fund to contract Clermont-Ganneau to continue the work of Wilson and Warren. He exposed more of the Temple Mount walls and even got to examine the Haram esh-Sharif (Temple grounds). He investigated other ancient ruins, cemeteries, and tomb chambers, and surveyed the region between Jerusalem and Jaffa, and visited Biblical Samaria.
Two more of his major discoveries were the site of Gezer, and a first-century BC Greek tablet from the long-gone ritual barrier against Gentile trespass at the Herodian Temple. Clermont-Ganneau later directed expeditions to Syria (1881), the Red Sea (‘86), Crete (‘95), and the Egyptian Nile island of Elephantine, 1906–08. While professor of archaeology and oriental epigraphy at the College de France, he improved translations of important texts in Phoenician, Aramaic, New-Punic, Nabataean, and Palmarene.
Identification of the Gezer site best displays Charles Clermont-Ganneau’s ingenuity. The location of this Biblical city had eluded even Edward Robinson. But the reading of an Arabic history of Palestine by one Mujir al-Din (AD 1456–1521) afforded an unexpected clue. A band of marauding bedouin had clashed with Mameluke occupation forces in the Ramle region, near Lod (location of modern Israel’s airport). The writer observed that battle-cries could be heard as far as Tel Jazar and the nearby village of Hulda. “Tel Jazar!” Could this be Gezer?
A huge mound some 7 miles south of Ramle and a few miles north of Hulda seemed likely enough that Clermont-Ganneau went public with that proposal in 1871. He confirmed it two years later with his incredible discovery of some “Boundary of Gezer” field markers. Not many archaeologists can match this man’s career.