Stele

A stelefrom , stēlē, ; plural: stelae, , stēlai, ; also found: Latinised singular stela and Anglicised plural steles is a stone or wooden slab, mostly taller than it is wide, that is built so that people will remember something when they look at it. Mostly it is decorated with the names and titles of the person that is a reminder of. This is inscribed, carved in relief or painted onto the slab.

 History and function 
Stelae were also used as territorial markers, as the boundary stelae of Akhenaten at Amarna,Memoirs  By Egypt Exploration Society Archaeological Survey of Egypt 1908, p.
19 or to commemorate military victories.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) They were widely used in Mesopotamia, Greece, Egypt, Ethiopia, and, quite independently, in China and some Buddhist cultures, and by Mesoamerican civilisations, especially the OlmecPool, op.cit.,  p.265 and Maya.Pool, op.cit., p.277 The huge number of stelae that survive from ancient Egypt and in Central America are one of the largest and most significant sources of information on those civilisations.

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.

An obelisk is a specialized kind of stele. The Celtic high crosses of Ireland, Scotland, and Wales are specialized stelae.The totem pole of North and South America is a type of stelae.  Gravestones are also kinds of stelae.

In 2004 the architect Peter Eisenman created a field of some 2,700 blank stelae, the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in BerlinTill, op.cit., p.168 to memory of the Holocaust.

 Notable individual stelae 

Code of Hammurabi
Rosetta Stone

 Gallery 

Related pages
 Rune stone

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

 Footnotes and references 

 Other websites 

 Funerary Stela 

Category:Archaeology
Category:Art