Moabite

The Canaanite language of the kingdom of Moab, east of the Dead Sea, known almost entirely from a single monument: the stele that King Mesha of Moab raised at Dibon around 840 BCE to record his victories over Israel, thirty-four lines that remain the longest royal inscription recovered from the Iron Age Levant. A handful of seals and fragments make up the rest of the corpus. Moabite sits so close to Biblical Hebrew that the two were largely mutually intelligible, sharing the bulk of their grammar and lexicon; the stele’s language differs from the Hebrew of the same century in a few tell-tale details of morphology and spelling.

Moabite was written in the same Phoenician-derived consonantal alphabet as early Hebrew, and this atlas renders it accordingly: original forms in the Phoenician letter shapes that scholarly editions use for the script, transliterations kept consonantal as the stone writes them, with no vocalization imposed. Unlike Hebrew, Moabite left no reading tradition; its vowels are recoverable only by comparison with its sister languages, so the atlas does not guess at them. The language’s own name for itself is unattested, one more thing the single great stone did not happen to say.

@misc{onomastikon-moabite,
  author = {Rajagopal, Shriram},
  title = {Moabite},
  year = {2026},
  howpublished = {\url{https://onomastikon.org/languages/moabite}},
  note = {Onomastikon: A Digital Atlas of Ancient Names}
}