Stele
A stele 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 , or painted onto the slab.
Stelae were also used as territorial markers, as the boundary stelae of Akhenaton at
Amarna, or to commemorate military victories. They were widely used in the
Ancient Near East,
Greece,
Egypt,
Ethiopia, and, quite independently, in
China and some
Buddhist cultures , and, more surely independently, by
Mesoamerican civilisations, notably the
Olmec and Maya.
Encyclopedia
A
stele 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 , or painted onto the slab.
Stelae were also used as territorial markers, as the boundary stelae of Akhenaton at
Amarna, or to commemorate military victories. They were widely used in the
Ancient Near East,
Greece,
Egypt,
Ethiopia, and, quite independently, in
China and some
Buddhist cultures , and, more surely independently, by
Mesoamerican civilisations, notably the
Olmec and Maya. 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
High crosses of Ireland,
Scotland and
Wales i.e. Celtic areas of Britain are
specialized stelae. A modern
gravestone with its inscribed epitaph is also a kind of stele.
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. The memorial is meant to be read not only as the field, but also as an erasure of datum that refers to memory of the Holocaust.
Notable individual stelae
See also
