A Biblical person revealed. The late Nahman Avigad deciphered this inscription, which other scholars had declared too damaged to read (dotted lines represent obliterated parts of letters as restored by Avigad). In 1870, French archaeologist Charles Clermont-Ganneau discovered the three lines of paleo-Hebrew script inscribed on the lintel of a door to a tomb hewn out of the rock cliff at Silwan, on the east side of the Kidron Valley in Jerusalem. Scholars made little progress on the decipherment, however, until Avigad published the following reading in 1953 “This is [the sepulchre of…]yahu who is over the house. There is no silver and no gold here / but [his bones] and the bones of his slave-wife with him. Cursed be the man / who will open this!” The title “who is over the house” signifies a royal steward, an official of high rank in the palace. Because of the title, the tomb’s location (opposite the eastern ridge of Jerusalem, where the palace stood) and the date of the inscription (late eighth century B.C.E.), many scholars believe the tomb may be ascribed to Shebna, royal steward to King Hezekiah (727–698 B.C.E.). Shebna’s full name, according to Avigad, is Shebnayahu. The tomb with this inscription may be the very tomb that Isaiah referred to when he rebuked Shebna, “O you who have hewn your tomb on high.… The Lord is about to shake you” (Isaiah 22:16–17).