A six-and-a-half-foot black limestone monolith with twenty registers of relief carving and an Akkadian inscription, recovered by Austen Henry Layard at Nimrud (ancient Kalhu) in 1846 from the Central Palace of Shalmaneser III. The British Museum has held it since 1848. The relief panels record tribute received by Shalmaneser from five subject kings during his thirty-five-year reign (859–824 BC). Register two carries the most-cited single image in biblical archaeology. A figure prostrate before the seated Assyrian king, beard touching the ground, attended by porters bearing silver, gold, tin, and a staff. The cuneiform caption above reads: "Tribute of Iaua son of Omri — silver, gold, a golden bowl, a golden vase with pointed bottom, golden tumblers, golden buckets, tin, a staff for the king's hand, javelins, I received from him." Iaua is Jehu — the same Jehu who in 2 Kings 9–10 led the bloody coup that exterminated the house of Ahab and ended the Omride dynasty in Israel. The reference to him as "son of Omri" is Assyrian convention, not genealogy: Israel was the bīt-Humri (House of Omri) in Assyrian records for over a century after the dynasty's actual fall. The tribute scene is dated by the inscription to Shalmaneser's regnal year 18 — 841 BC — the same year 2 Kings 10 places Jehu's accession. The obelisk stands in the Assyrian galleries of the British Museum. Sources: Mordechai Cogan, The Raging Torrent (Carta, 2008); Albert Kirk Grayson, Assyrian Rulers of the Early First Millennium BC II (RIMA 3, University of Toronto Press, 1996); Edwin Yamauchi, The Stones and the Scriptures (IVP, 1972); 2 Kings 9–10.
The Black Obelisk provides the only surviving ancient image of a named Israelite monarch, fixing Jehu's reign and his payment of tribute to Shalmaneser III at 841 BC through an independent Assyrian record that corroborates the biblical chronology of 2 Kings 9–10 with uncommon precision.