9:16 shields made he of beaten gold. These three hundred shields of gold would not have been useful for fighting, so must have been simply for decorating Solomon’s palace. Although none of these have ever been found (they were later plundered by Pharoah Shishak—note II Chronicles 12:9—and perhaps melted down for other uses), the fact that other monarchs also made golden shields is confirmed on one of the Assyrian king Sargon’s cuneiform clay prisms, in which he gloats over the capture of several shields of gold from the city of Muoasir in Urartia.