The meter-tall stone that has come to be called the Mesha Stele, its smooth, black basalt carved some sixteen centuries before it was unearthed from the packed, red sand of Dhiban, Jordan in 1868, is arguably most important for what comes at the conclusion of all of its sentences: a period. “I am Mesha, son of Kemoshyat,” reads the inscription, “the king of Moab.”
Now displayed at the Louvre, pieced back together after a group of Bedouins protesting the Ottoman occupation smashed the stele, a visitor can see the characteristic dot of an end-stop after each word of the inscription. Though the anonymous scribe who chiseled this message nine centuries before the Common Era used the period in a way that we’d find idiosyncratic—the marks separating every individual word rather than ending individual syntactical units—it’s still clearly and obviously the same punctuation mark with which you’ll see at the end of this line. The Mesha Stele is, as such, the oldest example of writing to contain punctuation. No doubt the Moabite’s periods were used to interrupt the so-called scriptio continua of ancient writing wherebywordswouldbemergedtogetherinamannerthat’sdifficulttoread.
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