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The Shiloah (Siloam) inscription (כתובת השילוח) or Silwan inscription is a passage of inscribed text found in the Siloam tunnel which brings water from the Gihon Spring to the Pool of Siloam, located in the City of David in East Jerusalem neighborhood of Shiloah or "Silwan". The inscription records the construction of the tunnel, which has been dated to the 8th century BCE on the basis of the writing style.〔; quote: "A good case can be made on the basis of the paleography to date the inscription in the Iron Age. The inscription itself, on the other hand, does not tell us this. It is only a secondary source, which in this case may be right but which can also be wrong, because nobody can really say on the basis of this anonymous inscription whether it was Hezekiah or some other Judean king from the eighth or seventh century who constructed the tunnel. As it stands, it is the only clear example of an inscription from either Israel or Judah commemorating a public construction work. As such it is a poor companion to similar inscriptions not least from Egypt and Mesopotamia."〕 It is the only known ancient inscription from the wider region which commemorates a public construction work, despite such inscriptions being commonplace in Egyptian and Mesopotamian archaeology.〔 It is among the oldest extant records of its kind written in Hebrew using the Paleo-Hebrew alphabet,〔(【引用サイトリンク】title=THE ANCIENT HEBREW INSCRIPTION OF SILOAM )〕 a regional variant of the Phoenician alphabet. Its association with the tunnel has been interpreted to provide evidence for the ancient Biblical narrative. The inscription is at permanent exhibition at the Istanbul Archaeology Museum. ==History== The tunnel was discovered in 1838 by Edward Robinson.〔Amihai Mazar, ''Archaeology of the Land of the Bible'' () 484〕 Despite the tunnel being examined extensively during the 19th century by Robinson, Charles Wilson, and Charles Warren, they all missed discovering the inscription, probably due to the accumulated mineral deposits making it barely noticeable. According to Easton's Bible Dictionary,〔(Siloam, Pool of ) at Easton's Bible Dictionary〕 in 1880 a youth (Jacob Eliahu, later Jacob Spafford〔''Jerusalem. The Biography'', Simon Sebag Montefiore, page 42, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2011, ISBN 9780297852650.〕) wading up the tunnel from the Siloam Pool end discovered the inscription cut in the rock on the eastern side, about 19 feet into the tunnel. The inscription was surreptitiously cut from the wall of the tunnel in 1891 and broken into fragments which were recovered through the efforts of the British Consul in and placed in the Istanbul Archaeology Museum.〔The (''Jewish Encyclopedia'' ) (1906) states: "The inscription was broken in an attempt made to steal it; but the fragments are now in the museum at Constantinople; and from casts that have been taken, copies of which are in Paris, London, and Berlin, it has been possible to gain an exact idea of its arrangement and to decipher it almost entirely."〕 The ancient city of Jerusalem, being on a mountain, was naturally defensible from almost all sides but its major source of fresh water, the Gihon spring, was on the side of the cliff overlooking the Kidron valley. The Bible records that King Hezekiah, fearful that the Assyrians would lay siege to the city, blocked the spring's water outside the city and diverted it through a channel into the Pool of Siloam. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Siloam inscription」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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