Siloam inscription

The so called Siloam inscription was discovered 1880 by the young fellow Jacob Eliahu. He was a 16 year old Jewish boy, raised in Ramallah, and attending vocational training in Jerusalem.

The inscription was discovered at the end of the Siloam or Hezekiah’s tunnel close to the Pool of Siloam. The tunnel was carved out of the rock around 700 BC, during the reign of king Hezekiah’s, to transport water from the Gihon spring outside the city. The construction work was done from both ends with a length of 530 m. The laborers met at the middle of that distance. It is still a mysterium how the workers could met so exactly in the middle of the tunnel. The tunnel was well known for researches, but nobody had ever discovered the inscription until this young fellow found it 1880.

The tunnel is dark inside and the height hardly so tall that one can walk straight inside. Today the lever of water goes to the knees.

As the young fellow found the inscription he talked with his teacher, who happened to be the well known archaeologist Conrad Schick. As Schick inspected the inscription he found about 6 lines of markings in the wall, probably Phoenician letters (an ancient Hebrew script).

The discovery of the inscription was first published by Conrad Schick in the German Zeitschrift des Deutschen Palästina-Vereins the summer 1880. Schick also made two drawings of he inscriptions, which he sent to the London based Palestine Exploration Found (PEF) magazine. A number of drawings and plaster copies were made of the inscription, but not fully legible. The discovery was highly interesting and a number of international scholars visited the tunnel.

Ten years later it was reported that the inscription had been taken down and broken in pieces. The inscription was later taken by the Ottoman authorities to the Istanbul Archaeological Museum were it still is exposed.

Click to access siloam-inscription-istanbul-archeaological-museum.pdf

Read more about the inscription

Conrad Schick only mention a young boy and student of him as the one who made the discovery. Many years later, Bertha Spafford Vester, daughter of the founder of the “American Colony” in Jerusalem, said that the young boy actually was her adopted brother, Jacob Eliahu.

Jacob Eliahu is a very interesting person. It is said he easily spoke a number of languages, among them Swedish. But that is another question and not related to Conrad Schick!