A limestone lintel cut from a rock tomb on the eastern slope of the Kidron Valley, in the Silwan cemetery facing the City of David. The tomb itself is one of a row of monumental rock-cut sepulchers carved into the cliff face — the burial ground reserved in Iron Age Judah for high officials. The lintel was removed from above the tomb door in the 1860s by Charles Clermont-Ganneau and acquired by the British Museum, where it has remained in the Ancient Levant gallery. Two lines of palaeo-Hebrew are preserved, dated by script to the late eighth century BC. The text reads: "This is [the tomb of ...]yahu who is over the house. There is no silver and no gold here, only [his bones] and the bones of his maidservant with him. Cursed be the man who opens this." The personal name is broken at the critical letters; only the theophoric ending -yahu survives. In 1953 Nahman Avigad of the Hebrew University proposed the missing name was Shebanyahu — the formal Hebrew of the Shebna whom Isaiah 22:15–25 denounces by office: "the steward who is over the house... Behold, the LORD will hurl you away violently, O man, and will seize firm hold on you. He will whirl you round and round, and throw you like a ball into a wide land. There you shall die, and there shall be your glorious chariots, you shame of your master's house." The phrase Isaiah singles out — who is over the house, in Hebrew asher al ha-bayit — is the exact title preserved on the Silwan lintel. The identification is plausible but not certain. The name on the lintel is broken; the title is generic to the office of royal steward and held by several Judean officials across two centuries. What the inscription does establish, undisputed, is the architectural and onomastic context Isaiah's oracle assumes — a royal steward of Judah cutting himself a monumental tomb in the Silwan cliff, in the very generation Isaiah names. The lintel is on display at the British Museum, inventory 125205. Sources: Nahman Avigad, "The Epitaph of a Royal Steward from Siloam Village" (Israel Exploration Journal 3, 1953); Christopher Rollston, Writing and Literacy in the World of Ancient Israel (SBL Press, 2010); David Ussishkin, The Village of Silwan: The Necropolis from the Period of the Judean Kingdom (Israel Exploration Society, 1993); Isaiah 22:15–25.
Discovered in the Silwan cemetery and now held at the British Museum, this late-eighth-century BC lintel preserves the title "over the house" — the precise Hebrew designation for the royal steward Isaiah 22 targets — anchoring the prophet's oracle within recoverable archaeological and administrative realities of Iron Age Judah.