What was found. Under the oldest part of Jerusalem runs a winding rock tunnel about 1,700 feet (over 500 m) long, cut to carry the water of the Gihon spring inside the walls to the pool of Siloam, engineering meant to keep the city watered through a siege. In 1880 a boy wading the tunnel found, scratched on the wall about three feet above the water, a six-line inscription in archaic Hebrew, reported by the architect Conrad Schick.
What it says. It is not a royal proclamation but the diggers' own memo of the moment the two teams, tunnelling from opposite ends, met in the middle, in A. H. Sayce's public-domain translation: "while the excavators were still lifting up the pick toward each other, and while there were yet three cubits to be broken through… the excavators struck, each to meet the other, pick to pick. And there flowed the waters from their outlet to the pool for a thousand, two hundred cubits." (The original was later cut from the rock and is in the museum in Istanbul.)
The biblical connection. Scripture credits exactly this work to King Hezekiah, preparing for the Assyrian threat: "Hezekiah… made the pool, and the conduit, and brought water into the city" (2 Kings 20:20, American Standard Version), and "stopped the upper spring of the waters of Gihon, and brought them straight down on the west side of the city of David" (2 Chronicles 32:30, American Standard Version).
The caution. Most scholars date the tunnel and its script to Hezekiah's reign (about 700 BC), which fits the biblical notice; a minority have argued for a different date, but the Hezekiah dating is the mainstream reading, and this is a piece of the Old-Testament world a visitor can still wade through today.
Sources (read live 2026-06-29 + ISBE 1915, public domain). Inscription quoted from the ISBE entry "Siloam" (E. W. G. Masterman, giving A. H. Sayce's translation); discovery (1880, reported by C. Schick) per the same entry; modern dating discussion from open scholar overviews. Inscription: the Istanbul Archaeology Museums.
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