The Balu'a Stele is a basalt

stele A stele ( ) or stela ( )The plural in English is sometimes stelai ( ) based on direct transliteration of the Greek, sometimes stelae or stelæ ( ) based on the inflection of Greek nouns in Latin, and sometimes anglicized to steles ( ) or stela ...

(inscribed stone) with a near completely unreadable

Egyptian hieroglyphic Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs ( ) were the formal writing system used in Ancient Egypt for writing the Egyptian language. Hieroglyphs combined Ideogram, ideographic, logographic, syllabic and alphabetic elements, with more than 1,000 distinct char ...

inscription and relief panel. It was discovered in 1930 at the Khirbet al-Balu'a site north of the city of Karak and is thought to date to 1309–1151 BCE. The finding site is on the territory of the land of

Moab Moab () was an ancient Levant, Levantine kingdom whose territory is today located in southern Jordan. The land is mountainous and lies alongside much of the eastern shore of the Dead Sea. The existence of the Kingdom of Moab is attested to by ...

, but the ethnical identity of the person who has carved it cannot be asserted. The iconography contains

Canaan CanaanThe current scholarly edition of the Septuagint, Greek Old Testament spells the word without any accents, cf. Septuaginta : id est Vetus Testamentum graece iuxta LXX interprets. 2. ed. / recogn. et emendavit Robert Hanhart. Stuttgart : D ...

ite elements, while the overall composition strictly conforms to Egyptian canons. It has been interpreted as representing two deities investing a Canaanite king, whom Egyptians would have seen as " Asiatic" and probably

Shasu The Shasu (, possibly pronounced ''šaswə'') were Semitic-speaking pastoral nomads in the Southern Levant from the late Bronze Age to the Early Iron Age or the Third Intermediate Period of Egypt. They were tent dwellers, organized in clans ru ...

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Further reading