Stele

This article is about the stone structure. Stele is also a concept in plant biology.

Sueno's Stone in Forres Scotland

A stele (or stela) 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. The word derives from the Greek stele, "standing block". The word can be pronounced: (STEEL), or (STEEL--ahh), and the plural is stelae, pronounced (STEE--lay). 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 (see the Nestorian Stele), 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.

King Ezana's Stele in Axum, Ethiopia.

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 steles 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.

High Cross in Ireland

Kildalton Cross AD 800 Islay, Scotland.

Notable individual stelae

AxumiteStele

Code of Hammurabi
Gwanggaeto Stele
Nestorian Stele
Ukrainian stone stela
Lemnos stela
For Israel/Egypt:
*Merneptah Stele
*Mesha Stele
For Egypt:
*Boundary Stelae of Akhenaten
*Palermo stone
In the Western Hemisphere:
*Peru: Raimondi Stela
*Mexico: Stela C at Tres Zapotes

Stele

Notable individual stelae

See also