The Tel Dan Stele is a fragmentary stele containing a Canaanite inscription which dates to the 9th century BCE. It is notable for possibly being the most significant and perhaps the only extra-biblical archeological reference to the house of David. The Tel Dan Stele was discovered in 1993 in Tel-Dan by Gila Cook, a member of an archaeological team led by Avraham Biran. Its pieces were used to construct an ancient stone wall that survived into modern times. The stele contains several lines of Aramaic, closely related to Hebrew and historically a common language among Jews. The surviving inscription details that an individual killed Jehoram of Israel, the son of Ahab and king of the house of David. These writings corroborate passages from the Bible, as the Second Book of Kings mentions that Jehoram, also Joram, is the son of an Israelite king, Ahab, by his Phoenician wife, Jezebel. Applying a Biblical viewpoint to the inscription, the likely candidate for having erected the stele is Hazael, an Aramean king (whose language would have thus been Aramaic) who is mentioned in the Second Book of Kings as having conquered the Land of Israel, though he was unable to take Jerusalem. The stele is currently on display at the Israel Museum, and is known as KAI 310. Discovery and description Fragment A of the stele was discovered in July 1993 by Gila Cook of Biran's team who was studying Tel Dan in northern Israel. Fragments B1 and B2 were found in June 1994. The stele was not excavated in its "primary context", but in its "secondary use". The fragments were published by Biran and his colleague Joseph Naveh in 1993 and 1995. Overview The Tel Dan stele consists of several fragments making up part of a triumphal inscription in Aramaic, left most probably by Hazael of Aram-Damascus, an important regional figure in the late 9th century BCE. The unnamed king boasts of his victories over the king of Israel and his apparent ally the king of the "House of David" (b y t d w d). It is considered the earliest widely accepted reference to the name David as the founder of a Judahite polity outside of the Hebrew Bible, though the earlier Mesha Stele contains several possible references with varying acceptance. A minority of scholars have disputed the reference to David, due to the lack of a word divider between byt