Information about stela

This article is about the stone structure. For the usage in plant biology, see stele (biology).

Stela N, depicting King K'ac Yipyaj Chan K'awiil ("Smoke Shell"), as drawn by Frederick Catherwood in 1839

A stele (from Greek: στήλη, stēlē, IPA: /ˈstiːli/; plural: stelae, στῆλαι, stēlai, IPA: /ˈstiːlaɪ/; also found: Latinised singular stela and Anglicised plural steles) is a stone or wooden slab, generally taller than it is wide, erected for funerary or commemorative purposes, most usually decorated with the names and titles of the deceased or living—inscribed, carved in relief (bas-relief, sunken-relief, high-relief, etc), or painted onto the slab.

Stelae were also used as territorial markers, as the boundary stelae of Akhenaton at Amarna,^[1] or to commemorate military victories.^[2] They were widely used in the Ancient Near East, Greece, Egypt, Ethiopia, and, quite independently, in China and some Buddhist cultures (see the Nestorian Stele), and, more surely independently, by Mesoamerican civilisations, notably the Olmec^[3] and Maya.^[4] The huge number of stelae surviving from ancient Egypt and in Central America constitute one of the largest and most significant sources of information on those civilisations. An informative stele of Tiglath-Pileser III is preserved in the British Museum. Two stelae built into the walls of a church are major documents relating to the Etruscan language.

Unfinished standing stones, set up without inscriptions from Libya in North Africa to Scotland were monuments of pre-literate Megalithic cultures in the Late Stone Age.

In 1489, 1512, and 1663 CE, the Kaifeng Jews of China left these stone monuments to preserve their origin and history. Despite repeated flooding of the Yellow River, destroying their synagogue time and time again, these stelae survived to tell their tale.

An obelisk is a specialized kind of stele. The Celtic high crosses of Ireland, Scotland, and Wales are specialized stelae. Gravestones with inscribed epitaph are also kinds of stelae.

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 stelae.^[5] 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.

Notable individual stelae

Gallery

Ancient Egyptian funerary stele	Healing stele of Horus. Ptolemaic dynasty, c. 305-30 BC.	Sueno's Stone in Forres, Scotland	Maya stela, Quirigua
Kildalton Cross 800 AD Islay, Scotland	Cantabrian Stele 200 BC Cantabria, Spain	A Buddhist Stele from China, Northern Wei period, built in the early 6th century	The Rosetta Stone in the British Museum

Bibliography

John Boardman ed., The Cambridge Ancient History, Part 1, 2nd Edition, (ISBN-13: 9780521224963 | ISBN-10: 0521224969)
Christopher A. Pool, Olmec Archaeology and Early Mesoamerica, Cambridge University Press 2007 (ISBN-13: 9780521783125)
Karen E. Till, The New Berlin: Memory, Politics, Place, University of Minnesota Press 2005

Footnotes and references

1. ^ Memoirs By Egypt Exploration Society Archaeological Survey of Egypt 1908, p. 19
2. ^ e.g. Piye's victory stela (M. Lichtheim, Ancient Egyptian Literature Vol 3, The University of California Press 1980, , pp.66ff) or Shalmaneser's stela at Saluria (Boardman, op.cit, p.335)
3. ^ Pool, op.cit., p.265
4. ^ Pool, op.cit., p.277
5. ^ Till, op.cit., p.168

External links

Funerary Stela

In a vascular plant, the stele is the central part of the root or stem containing the vascular tissue and occasionally a pith. The concept of the stele was developed in the late nineteenth century by French botanists P. E. L. van Tieghem and H.
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Greek}}}
Writing system: Greek alphabet
Official status
Official language of: Greece
Cyprus
European Union
recognised as minority language in parts of:
European Union
Italy
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Regulated by:
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This chart shows concisely the most common way in which the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) is applied to represent the English language.

See International Phonetic Alphabet for English for a more complete version and Pronunciation respelling for English for phonetic
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A funeral is a ceremony marking a person's death.
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Bas-relief (pronounced [ˈbaʁəˌlif], French for "low relief") is a method of sculpting which entails carving or etching away the surface of a flat piece of stone or metal creating a sculpture portrayed as a
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Sunken-relief, otherwise known as intaglio or sometimes hollow-relief, is a method of sculpting which entails carving or etching an image into the surface of a flat piece of stone, metal, glass or wood.
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Alto-relievo is translated from Latin as high-relief, a technique in Classical antiquity sculpture to reveal human or animal figures that project out from a solid tablet of marble or other material.
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The site of Amarna (commonly known as el-Amarna or incorrectly as Tel el-Amarna; see below) (Arabic: العمارنة al-‘amārnä
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The terms ancient Near East or ancient Orient encompass the early civilizations predating classical antiquity in the region roughly corresponding to that described by the modern term Middle East (Egypt, Iraq, Turkey), during the time roughly spanning the Bronze Age
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Motto
Ελευθερία ή θάνατος
Eleftheria i thanatos
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Gumhūriyyat Miṣr al-ʿArabiyyah

Arab Republic of Egypt

Flag Coat of arms
Anthem
Bilady, Bilady, Bilady
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Ethiopia (IPA: /i.θi.oʊ.pi.ə/) ( ʾĪtyōṗṗyā), officially the
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China (Traditional Chinese:
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Buddhism is often described as a religion^[1] and a collection of various philosophies, based initially on the teachings of Siddhartha Gautama, known as Gautama Buddha.
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The Nestorian Stele or Nestorian Stone, formally the Memorial of the Propagation in China of the Luminous Religion from Daqin (大秦景教流行中國碑; pinyin: Dàqín Jǐngjiào liúxíng Zhōngguó bēi,
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Mesoamerica or Meso-America (Spanish: Mesoamérica) is a region in the mid-latitudes of the Americas, namely the culture area within which a number of pre-Columbian societies flourished before the Spanish colonization of the
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Maya civilization is a Mesoamerican civilization, noted for the only known fully developed written language of the pre-Columbian Americas, as well as its spectacular art, monumental architecture, and sophisticated mathematical and astronomical systems.
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Tiglath-Pileser III (Akkadian: Tukultī-Apil-Ešarra) was a prominent king of Assyria in the 8th century BC (ruled 745–727 BC)^[1]^[2] and is widely regarded as the founder of the Neo-Assyrian Empire.
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The British Museum

Established 1754
Location Great Russell Street, London WC1, England
Collection size 13+ million objects
Museum area 13.5 acres/ 588,000 ft²/ 94 Galleries^[1]
Visitor figures 4,600,000 (2005–2006)^[2]
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Etruscan}}}
Language codes
ISO 639-1: none
ISO 639-2: und
ISO 639-3: ett The Etruscan language was spoken and written by Etruscan civilization in the ancient region of Etruria (modern Tuscany plus western Umbria and northern
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Standing stones, orthostats, liths or more commonly, megaliths because of their large and cumbersome size, are solitary stones set vertically in the ground and come in many different varieties.
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al-jamāhīriyyatu l-`arabiyyatu l-lībiyyatu š-ša`biyyatu l-ištirākiyyatu l-`uZmà
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Motto
Nemo me impune lacessit (Latin)
"No one provokes me with impunity"
"Cha togar m'fhearg gun dioladh"
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megalith is a large stone which has been used to construct a structure or monument, either alone or together with other stones. Megalithic means structures made of such large stones, utilizing an interlocking system without the use of mortar or cement.
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Neolithic^[1] or "New" Stone Age, was a period in the development of human technology that is traditionally the last part of the Stone Age. The Neolithic era follows the terminal Holocene Epipalaeolithic
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14th century - 15th century - 16th century
1450s 1460s 1470s - 1480s - 1490s 1500s 1510s
1486 1487 1488 - 1489 - 1490 1491 1492

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Subjects: Archaeology - Architecture -
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15th century - 16th century - 17th century
1480s 1490s 1500s - 1510s - 1520s 1530s 1540s
1509 1510 1511 - 1512 - 1513 1514 1515

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Subjects: Archaeology - Architecture -
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Stela

Notable individual stelae

Gallery

See also

Bibliography

Footnotes and references

External links