Silver Bowl of Qaynu Son of Geshem

The bowls were reportedly found at Tell el-Maskhuta in Wadi Tumilat, Egypt, in the mid-twentieth century and were acquired by the Brooklyn Museum in 1954 and 1957 through the Charles Edwin Wilbour Fund. Their reported association with an ancient shrine explains the libation interpretation, although acquisition-era provenance is less secure than a modern controlled excavation. Isaac Rabinowitz published the inscribed bowl, and subsequent North Arabian epigraphic studies used its names and titles to reconstruct Qedar's fifth-century political reach.

The object is a shallow silver libation bowl with a short Aramaic text incised around its surface. The dedication names Qaynu, his father Geshem, the kingship of Qedar, and the deity Han-Ilat. Silver, dedicatory wording, and shrine context identify it as an elite cultic gift rather than domestic tableware. The inscription's value is unusually concentrated: patronymic, royal title, ethnic-polity designation, and religious dedication occur together on one portable vessel, allowing linguistic and political analysis even while the find circumstances remain imperfect.

Palaeography and historical comparison place the bowl in the later fifth century BCE, the broad Persian-period setting of Nehemiah. Qedar was a North Arabian polity with influence along caravan corridors linking Arabia, Sinai, southern Palestine, and Egypt. The bowl's Egyptian provenance therefore makes geographic sense without requiring Geshem to have ruled Jerusalem's neighborhood directly. A second proposed attestation of Gashmu in a Lihyanite inscription has entered discussion, but name restoration and identification must be evaluated separately rather than used circularly to prove the bowl's biblical connection.