In the summer of 1996, the Tel Miqne-Ekron expedition led by Seymour Gitin of the Albright Institute and Trude Dothan of the Hebrew University was excavating Temple Complex 650 — a pillared sanctuary in the lower city of Ekron, identified by destruction debris with the city sacked by Nebuchadnezzar in 603 BC. In a sealed floor context against the west wall they recovered a rectangular limestone block, twenty-four inches long and ten thick, carved with five lines of Phoenician-script Canaanite. The find made headlines in the New York Times the same week. It is the only royal building inscription recovered intact in situ in the Philistine archaeological record. The text reads: "The temple which Achish, son of Padi, son of Ysd, son of Ada, son of Ya'ir, ruler of Ekron, built for PT[N]YH his lady. May she bless him, and protect him, and prolong his days, and bless his land." Five generations of Ekron's kings are named in dynastic succession. Two of the names — Padi and Achish — were already known from Assyrian royal annals: Padi appears in Sennacherib's prism account of the 701 BC campaign as the king of Ekron deposed and restored, and Achish is named in the annals of Esarhaddon and Ashurbanipal as a tributary king in the 670s and 660s BC. The dedication is to a goddess whose name reads Ptgyh or Ptnyh — most scholars now read it as a local form of Asherah, though the question is unresolved. The inscription confirms the Philistine pentapolis city named twenty-three times in the Hebrew Bible — Ekron of the captured ark in 1 Samuel 5–6, Ekron of Ahaziah's inquiry to Baal-zebub in 2 Kings 1, Ekron condemned in Amos 1 and Jeremiah 25 — was an ongoing Iron Age polity through the seventh century BC, ruled by a dynasty whose names match the Assyrian record. The inscription is on display at the Israel Museum, Jerusalem. Sources: Seymour Gitin, Trude Dothan, and Joseph Naveh, "A Royal Dedicatory Inscription from Ekron" (Israel Exploration Journal 47, 1997); Aaron Demsky, "The Name of the Goddess of Ekron: A New Reading" (Journal of the Ancient Near Eastern Society 25, 1998); Seymour Gitin, ed., The Excavations at Tel Miqne-Ekron (Israel Exploration Society, multi-volume series, 2006–); 1 Samuel 5:10–12.
The Ekron inscription provides the only in-situ royal dedicatory text from Philistine archaeology, directly correlating two biblical city-names — Padi and Achish — with Assyrian annals and anchoring the Hebrew Bible's repeated references to Ekron within a historically verified, continuous Iron Age dynasty extending into the seventh century BC.