The earliest alphabetic document, in a language that is decipherable, and the date of which is approximately determinable, is the famous Moabite Stone. This relic of the remote past was discovered in 1868 among the ruins of Dibon by Dr. Klein, a missionary of the Church of England while touring in the region once known as the land of Moab, and whence its designation. The Moabite Stone is a slab of black basalt, nearly four feet high and two feet wide, rounded at the top, and contains an inscription of thirty-four lines cut in Phœnician characters. It is ascribed to the first half of the ninth century B. C. The Stone was intact when discovered though it suffered an attempted destruction by Arabs before it could be removed to a place of safety. The preserved fragments contain six hundred and sixty-nine characters, and many additional characters have been restored from the surviving portions. The inscription on the Stone contains the account of Mesha's breaking away from the rule of Israel and gives striking corroboration of the scripture record (II Kings 3:4-27) and recounts that the king Mesha, after Ahab's death, "rebelled against the king of Israel." "The whole inscription," says Professor Sayce, "reads like a chapter from one of the historical books of the Old Testament. Not only are the phrases the same, but the words and the grammatical forms are, with one or two exceptions, all found in scriptural Hebrew." He adds, further, "The Moabite Stone shows us what were the forms of the Phœnician letters used on the eastern side of the Jordan in the time of Ahab. The forms employed in Israel and Judah on the western side could not have differed much; and we may therefore see in these venerable characters the precise mode of writing employed by the earlier prophets of the Old Testament."[52]