In 1939 a basalt stele a little over four feet tall was recovered from the village of Breidj, six miles north of Aleppo in northern Syria. Its upper register carries a relief of the Tyrian god Melqart in profile, holding an axe and a lotus, striding to the right. Beneath the figure run five lines of Old Aramaic in a tenth-to-ninth-century BC alphabetic hand. The opening reads: "The stele which Bar-Hadad set up for his lord Melqart, which he vowed to him and he heard his voice." The patronymic — the line naming the dedicator's father and grandfather — is the most-disputed text in early Aramaic epigraphy. William F. Albright published the first major reading in 1942 and reconstructed the patronymic as bar Tab-Rimmon bar Hezion, king of Aram — a sequence that would identify the dedicator with the Bar-Hadad named in 1 Kings 15:18 as son of Tabrimmon son of Hezion, the Damascene king Asa of Judah hired against Baasha of Israel around 885 BC. Frank M. Cross revised the reading in 1972, arguing the surface preserved a longer royal title and a different ancestor; Pierre Bordreuil and Javier Teixidor offered a third reconstruction in 1983, reading bar Attar-Hamak and severing the link with 1 Kings entirely. The dispute is not over whether a Bar-Hadad of Damascus existed — the biblical and Assyrian records both attest the dynasty — but over whether this Bar-Hadad is the one named in Scripture. The stele is genuinely ninth-century BC, genuinely royal, and genuinely a king of Aram dedicating to Melqart; what it cannot now bear is a confident identification with the antagonist of Asa, Baasha, or Ahab. The basalt is too weathered at the critical line for any of the three readings to claim certainty. The stele is on display at the Aleppo Archaeological Museum. Sources: William F. Albright, "A Votive Stele Erected by Ben-Hadad I of Damascus to the God Melcarth" (BASOR 87, 1942); Frank M. Cross, "The Stele Dedicated to Melcarth by Ben-Hadad of Damascus" (BASOR 205, 1972); Pierre Bordreuil and Javier Teixidor, "Nouvel examen de l'inscription de Bar-Hadad" (Aula Orientalis 1, 1983); 1 Kings 15:18–20.
The Bar-Hadad Melqart Stele provides the only known monumental Aramaic inscription that may name a Damascene king mentioned in 1 Kings, making it a critical test case for correlating biblical Aram-Damascus with the epigraphic and archaeological record of the ninth century BC.