.jpg)
A polished black basalt sarcophagus of Egyptian anthropoid form, eight feet long, the lid carved with the face of a young king in the manner of late-period Egyptian royal coffins. It was unearthed in February 1855 outside Sidon by a French expedition under Antoine-Aimé Péretié and Honoré d'Albert, Duc de Luynes; the duke purchased it from the Ottoman authorities and presented it to the Louvre, where it has been on display since 1856. Around the upper chest of the lid run twenty-two lines of Phoenician script — one of the longest Phoenician royal inscriptions ever recovered — identifying the occupant as Eshmunazar, king of the Sidonians, son of King Tabnit, and dating the burial to the early fifth century BC. The inscription is principally a curse against tomb robbers, but its central historical line lies near its end: "Furthermore, the lord of kings gave us Dor and Joppa, the mighty lands of Dagon, which are in the plain of Sharon, in accordance with the great deeds which I did. And we annexed them to the borders of the country, that they should belong to the Sidonians forever." The lord of kings is the Persian Great King — most likely Xerxes I or Artaxerxes I — and the gift is a Persian administrative grant of two coastal cities to the Phoenician vassal-kingdom of Sidon, dated by palaeography to roughly 475 BC. The geographical confirmation matters for the New Testament. Joppa is the harbor where Peter raised Tabitha and saw the vision of the unclean animals (Acts 9:36–43, 10:9–16); Dor lies thirty miles up the same coast. The sarcophagus places both cities under Sidonian Phoenician administration in the Persian period, and the inscription documents the layered Persian-period coastal geography that Hellenistic and Roman administration inherited and that Luke takes for granted six centuries later as the setting of the Cornelius episode. The sarcophagus stands in the Louvre's Department of Near Eastern Antiquities, Sully wing, room 311. Sources: Mark Lidzbarski, Handbuch der nordsemitischen Epigraphik (Weimar, 1898); Charles R. Krahmalkov, A Phoenician-Punic Grammar (Brill, 2001); Josette Elayi, Histoire de la Phénicie (Perrin, 2013); Acts 9:36–43.
The Eshmunazar Sarcophagus provides the only extant royal inscription naming both Joppa and Dor as Persian-period administrative grants, fixing their Phoenician coastal context circa 475 BC. This Phoenician epigraphic evidence directly anchors the geographic setting Luke presupposes in the Petrine narratives of Acts 9–10.