Mesha Stele in the context of "David"

Moab (/ˈmoʊæb/) was an ancient Levantine kingdom whose territory is today located in southern Jordan. The land is mountainous and lies alongside much of the eastern shore of the Dead Sea. The existence of the Kingdom of Moab is attested to by numerous archaeological findings, most notably the Mesha Stele, which describes the Moabite victory over an unnamed son of King Omri of Israel, an episode also noted in 2 Kings 3. The Moabite capital was Dibon. According to the Hebrew Bible, Moab was often in conflict with its Israelite neighbours to the west.
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Punctuation marks are marks indicating how a piece of written text should be read (silently or aloud) and, consequently, understood. The oldest known examples of punctuation marks were found in the Mesha Stele from the 9th century BC, consisting of points between the words and horizontal strokes between sections. The alphabet-based writing began with no spaces, no capitalization, no vowels (see abjad), and with only a few punctuation marks, as it was mostly aimed at recording business transactions. Only with the Greek playwrights (such as Euripides and Aristophanes) did the ends of sentences begin to be marked to help actors know when to make a pause during performances. Punctuation includes space between words and both obsolete and modern signs.

By the 19th century, grammarians explained the difference between the punctuation marks by means of a hierarchy that ascribed different weight to them. Six marks, proposed in 1966 by the French author Hervé Bazin, could be seen as predecessors of emoticons and emojis.

The Moabite language, also known as the Moabite dialect, is an extinct sub-language or dialect of the Canaanite languages, themselves a branch of Northwest Semitic languages, formerly spoken in the region described in the Bible as Moab (modern day central-western Jordan) in the early 1st millennium BC.

The body of Canaanite epigraphy found in the region is described as Moabite; this is a very small corpus limited primarily to the Mesha Stele and a few seals.

The Omride dynasty, Omrides or House of Omri (Hebrew: בֵּית עָמְרִי‎‎, romanized: Bēt ʿOmrī; Akkadian: 𒂍𒄷𒌝𒊑𒄿, romanized: bīt-Ḫûmrî) were the ruling dynasty of the Kingdom of Samaria founded by King Omri. The dynasty's rule ended with the murder of Jehoram of Israel by Jehu in c. 841 BC.

Five Assyrian records are known to refer to either "Land of Omri" or "House of Omri". An archaeological reference to Omri and his unnamed son is found in the Mesha Stele, the only Northwest Semitic inscription known to reference this name. According to the Bible, the Omride rulers of Israel were Omri, Ahab, Ahaziah and Jehoram. Ahab's daughter Athaliah also became queen regnant of the Kingdom of Judah.

King Mesha (Moabite: 𐤌𐤔𐤏, vocalized as: Mōšáʿ; Hebrew: מֵישַׁע Mēšaʿ‍) was a king of Moab in the 9th century BC, known most famously for having the Mesha Stele inscribed and erected at Dibon, Jordan. In this inscription he calls himself "Mesha, son of Kemosh-[...], the king of Moab, the Dibonite."