Stele

A stele (/ˈstiːli/ STEE-lee), or occasionally stela (plural stelas or stelæ), when derived from Latin, is a stone or wooden slab, generally taller than it is wide, erected in the ancient world as a monument. Grave stelae were often used for funerary or commemorative purposes. Stelae as slabs of stone would also be used as ancient Greek and Roman government notices or as boundary markers to mark borders or property lines.Princess Nefertiabet's funerary slab stele (c. 2575 BC) from Egypt's 4th dynastyEgyptian grave stela of Nehemes-Ra-tawy, c. 760–656 BCStele #25 (c. 2500 BC) from the Petit Chasseur in Sion, SwitzerlandA neolithic Sardinian menhir (c. 2500 BC) recovered at Laconi and assigned to the Abealzu-Filigosa cultureThe lunette of the Code of Hammurabi (c. 1750 BC), depicting the king receiving his law from the sun god ShamashBaal with Thunderbolt (c. 14th century BC), a Ugaritic stele from SyriaThe Merneptah Stele (c. 1200 BC), engraved on the back of a reused stele of Amenhotep III's, with the earliest mention of the name IsraelAn unusually well-preserved Greek herm (c. 520 BC), used as a boundary marker and to ward off evilA votive stela honoring the Thracian goddess Bendis (c. 400 BC), carved at AthensA herm of Demosthenes, a c. 1520 recreation of the c. 280 BC original located in the Athenian marketThe Rosetta Stone (196 BC), establishing the divine cult of Ptolemy VA Buddhist Stele from China, Northern Wei period, built sometime after 583A rubbing of the Yamanoue Stele (681) in Takasaki, one of three protected steles in JapanStele 35 from Yaxchilan (8th century), depicting Lady Eveningstar, the consort of king Shield Jaguar IIThe Nestorian Stele (781) records the success of the missionary Alopen in Tang China in Chinese and Syriac. It is borne by a Bixi and forbidden to travel abroad.Rodney's Stone, a slab cross from Early Medieval ScotlandSueno's Stone (c. 9th century) in Forres, Scotland, displaying efforts at modern preservation of the Pictish stonesA rubbing of the Stele of Sulaiman, Prince of Xining (1348), bearing the Mani in six languages: Nepali, Tibetan, Uyghur, 'Phags-pa, Tangut, and Chinese.The Galle stele left by Zheng He on Sri Lanka in 1409 with trilingual inscriptions in Chinese, Tamil, and PersianTombstones (funerary stelae) at the Common Burying Ground and Island Cemetery, Newport, Rhode Island. Typical inscriptions include the names of the deceased interred under the stones. Ca. 18th century and later.A disc shaped gravestone or hilarri in Bidarray, western Pyrenees, Basque Country, featuring typical geometric and solar forms, as it was the custom since the period previous to Roman times A stele (/ˈstiːli/ STEE-lee), or occasionally stela (plural stelas or stelæ), when derived from Latin, is a stone or wooden slab, generally taller than it is wide, erected in the ancient world as a monument. Grave stelae were often used for funerary or commemorative purposes. Stelae as slabs of stone would also be used as ancient Greek and Roman government notices or as boundary markers to mark borders or property lines. The surface of the stele usually has text, ornamentation, or both. The ornamentation may be inscribed, carved in relief, or painted. Steles are occasionally erected as memorials to battles. For example, along with other memorials, there are more than half-a-dozen steles erected on the battlefield of Waterloo at the locations of notable actions by participants in battle. Traditional Western gravestones may technically be considered the modern equivalent of ancient stelae, though the term is very rarely applied in this way. Equally, stele-like forms in non-Western cultures may be called by other terms, and the words 'stele' and 'stelae' are most consistently applied in archaeological contexts to objects from Europe, the ancient Near East and Egypt, China, and sometimes Pre-Columbian America. Steles have also been used to publish laws and decrees, to record a ruler's exploits and honors, to mark sacred territories or mortgaged properties, as territorial markers, as the boundary steles of Akhenaton at Amarna, or to commemorate military victories. They were widely used in the ancient Near East, Mesopotamia, Greece, Egypt, Somalia, Eritrea, Ethiopia, and, most likely independently, in China and elsewhere in the Far East, and, independently, by Mesoamerican civilisations, notably the Olmec and Maya. The large number of steles, including inscriptions, surviving from ancient Egypt and in Central America constitute one of the largest and most significant sources of information on those civilisations, in particular Maya stelae. The most famous example of an inscribed stela leading to increased understanding is the Rosetta Stone, which led to the breakthrough allowing Egyptian hieroglyphs to be read. An informative stele of Tiglath-Pileser III is preserved in the British Museum. Two steles built into the walls of a church are major documents relating to the Etruscan language. Standing stones (menhirs), set up without inscriptions from Libya in North Africa to Scotland, were monuments of pre-literate Megalithic cultures in the Late Stone Age. The Pictish stones of Scotland, often intricately carved, date from between the 6th and 9th centuries. An obelisk is a specialized kind of stele. The Insular high crosses of Ireland and Britain are specialized steles. Totem poles of North and South America that are made out of stone may also be considered a specialized type of stele. Gravestones, typically with inscribed name and often with inscribed epitaph, are among the most common types of stele seen in Western culture. Most recently, in the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin, the architect Peter Eisenman created a field of some 2,700 blank steles. The memorial is meant to be read not only as the field, but also as an erasure of data that refer to memory of the Holocaust.