The Black Obelisk of Shalmaneser III
A black limestone obelisk from Kalhu with the annals of Shalmaneser III and five rows of reliefs showing tribute. The caption of the second row names Jehu of Israel, and the scene beneath shows him or his envoy bowing before the Assyrian king.
See the object at britishmuseum.org ↗The caption naming Jehu, text and translation (Royal Inscriptions of Assyria online, Shalmaneser III 88) ↗The main inscription, text and translation with line numbers (Royal Inscriptions of Assyria online, Shalmaneser III 14) ↗Description of the monument and its five scenes (Oracc, Nimrud project) ↗
Austen Henry Layard found the obelisk at Nimrud, ancient Kalhu, in 1846. It is just under two metres high and nearly undamaged. It was set up in a courtyard in the centre of the city about 825 BC, near the end of the reign of Shalmaneser III. Its long inscription summarises his campaigns year by year down to his thirty-first year.
Five bands of relief run round all four sides. Each shows the tribute of one ruler or land and has a one-line caption. The second caption says that the king received the payment of Iaua of Bit-Humri, literally “Jehu son of Omri”: silver, gold, a gold bowl, a gold tureen, gold vessels, gold pails, tin, staffs and spears. In the panel beneath it a figure bows to the ground before Shalmaneser. Assyrian scribes called Israel the house of Omri, after the founder of the dynasty that Jehu had just destroyed; the phrase marks him as ruler of that land, not as Omri’s descendant.
The caption gives no date. Other copies of the annals place the payment in the king’s eighteenth year, 841 BC; see Jehu’s Revolt and Tribute to Assyria. The books of Kings do not mention the tribute.
Cited in
- 853 BC, firm date
- 841 BC, firm date
- about 840 BC, estimated date