The Black Obelisk is a four-sided monument recording the campaigns and tribute receipts of Shalmaneser III. Its second register shows a figure prostrate before the Assyrian king, with attendants bearing goods behind him, and the epigraph above the scene names the tribute of Jehu.
The Assyrian phrase describes him as of the house of Omri, an Assyrian designation for the kingdom of Israel that outlived the dynasty it names. It is on that basis that the figure is identified with the Jehu of 2 Kings.
What it establishes, and the caution that goes with it
It establishes that an Assyrian king in the ninth century BCE received tribute from a ruler of Israel called Jehu. Combined with the Kurkh Monolith’s mention of Ahab, it puts two named Israelite kings into the Assyrian record within a generation of one another.
The caution concerns the image. It is often reproduced as a portrait of Jehu, and it is not one in any modern sense: Assyrian reliefs use a repertoire of standard figures, and the prostrate tributary is a type. Whether the man shown is Jehu himself or an envoy is disputed, and the epigraph does not settle it. A dossier using this monument should be citing the epigraph, not the face.
A chronological complication worth stating
The Assyrian date for the tribute and the biblical chronology of Jehu’s reign do not sit together without adjustment, and the adjustments proposed vary. This is a live problem in the chronology of the divided kingdoms, not a detail, and any page that uses this source to date Jehu inherits it.
How it is cited here
By CDLI P-number, which resolves to the artefact record and returns the museum number. The critical edition is the Royal Inscriptions of Mesopotamia series, where the text is A.0.102.14.