“One of the finest specimens of Phoenician writing, and also the oldest known one that can be dated, is an inscription in the alphabet of Tyre written in the reign of Mesha, king of Moab, early in the ninth century B.C. This inscription on a stone tablet with a rounded top known as the Moabite stone, was discovered in 1868 in the vicinity of the Dead Sea and is now in the museum of the Louvre in Paris.”

—Oscar Ogg, The 26 Letters, 1961.