stele

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

Ancient Greek funerary stele of Thrasea and Euandria. Marble, ca. 375-350 BC. Antikensammlung Berlin, Pergamon Museum, 738

A stele ( /ˈstiːliː/, historically /ˈstiːl/; Greek: στήλη stēlē; plural: στήλες stēlēz),^[1] also stela (plural stelae /ˈstiːlaɪ/) Latin,^[1] is a stone or wooden slab, generally taller than it is wide, erected for funerals 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, and so forth), or painted onto the slab. It can also be used as a territorial marker to delineate land ownership.

History

Stelae were also used as territorial markers, as the boundary stelae of Akhenaton at Amarna,^[2] or to commemorate military victories.^[3] They were widely used in the Ancient Near East, Mesopotamia, Greece, Egypt, Ethiopia, and, most likely independently, in China and elsewhere in the Far East, and, more surely independently, by Mesoamerican civilisations, notably the Olmec^[4] and Maya.^[5] 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. 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 stelae. Likewise, the Totem pole of North and South America is a type of 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.^[6] 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.

China

Stelae (Chinese: 碑; pinyin: béi) have been the major medium of stone inscription in China since the Tang dynasty.^[7] Chinese stelae are generally rectangular stone tablets upon which Chinese characters are carved intaglio with a funerary, commemorative, or edifying text. They can commemorate talented writers and officials, inscribe poems, portraits, or maps, and frequently contain the calligraphy of famous historical figures.^[8]

Chinese stelae from before the Tang dynasty are rare: there are a handful from before the Qin dynasty, roughly a dozen from the Western Han, 160 from the Eastern Han, and several hundred from the Wei, Jin, Southern and Northern dynasties, and Sui dynasty.^[9] During the Han dynasty, tomb inscriptions (Chinese: 墓誌; pinyin: mùzhì) containing biographical information on deceased people began to be written on stone tablets rather than wooden ones.^[9]

Erecting stelae at tombs or temples eventually became a widespread social and religious phenomenon. Emperors found it necessary to promulgate laws, regulating the use of funerary stelae by the population. The Ming Dynasty laws, instituted in the 14th century by its founder the Hongwu Emperor, listed a number of stele types available as status symbols to various ranks of the nobility and officialdom: the top noblemen and mandarins were eligible for stelae installed on top of a stone tortoise and crowned with hornless dragons, while the lower-level officials had to be satisfied with steles with plain rounded tops, standing on simple rectangular pedestals.^[10]

Stelae are found at nearly every significant mountain and historical site in China. The First Emperor made five tours of his domain in the third century BC and had Li Si make seven stone inscriptions commemorating and praising his work, of which fragments of two survive.^[11] One of the most famous mountain stelae is the 13 m (43 ft) high stele at Mount Tai with the personal calligraphy of Emperor Xuanzong of Tang commemorating his imperial sacrifices there in 725.^[11]

A number of such stone monuments have preserved the origin and history of China's minority religious communities. The 8th-century Christians of Xi'an left behind the Nestorian Stele, which survived adverse events of the later history by being buried underground for several centuries. Steles created by the Kaifeng Jews in 1489, 1512, and 1663, have survived the repeated flooding of the Yellow River that destroyed their synagogue several times, to tell us something about their world. China's Muslim have a number of steles of considerable antiquity as well, often containing both Chinese and Arabic text.

Thousands of steles, surplus to the original requirements, and no longer associated with the person they were erected for or to, have been assembled in Xi'an's Stele Forest Museum, which is a popular tourist attraction. Elsewhere, many unwanted steles can also be found in selected places in Beijing, such as Dong Yue Miao, the Five Pagoda Temple, and the Bell Tower, again assembled to attract tourists and also as a means of solving the problem faced by local authorities of what to do with them. The long, wordy, and detailed inscriptions on these steles are almost impossible to read for most are lightly engraved on white marble in characters only an inch or so in size, thus being difficult to see since the slabs are often ten or more feet tall.

There are more than 100,000 surviving stone inscriptions in China, but only approximately 30,000 have been transcribed or had rubbings made, and fewer than those 30,000 have been formally studied.^[9]

Notable stelae

Chinese ink rubbings of the 1489 (left) and 1512 (right) stelae left by the Kaifeng Jews.

Victory stele of Naram-Sin, a 23rd century BC Mesopotamian king.

• Axumite Stele
• Stele of Naram-Sin
• Code of Hammurabi
• Gwanggaeto Stele
• Kul Tigin memorial stele inscribed in Chinese and Turkic
• Nestorian Stele
• Ukrainian stone stela
• Lemnos stela
• Lapis Niger
• For Israel/Egypt:
  • Merneptah Stele
  • Mesha Stele
• For Egypt:
  • Rosetta Stone
  • Boundary Stelae of Akhenaten
  • Palermo stone
  • The Stele of Ankh-ef-en-Khonsu
• For Sub-Saharan Africa:
  • Axumite Stele
  • Gao-Saney
• In the Western Hemisphere:
  • Peru: Raimondi Stela
  • Mexico: Stela C at Tres Zapotes
  • Mexico: Izapa Stela 5
  • Mexico: La Mojarra Stela 1
  • Guatemala: Stele 14 from Piedras Negras
  • Honduras: Stele H from Copan
• Vietnam: the Doctorate stelae at the Temple of Literature

Gallery

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  Anthropomorphic stele no 25, Sion, Petit-Chasseur necropolis, Neolithic

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  Ancient Egyptian funerary stele

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  Healing stele of Horus-(a Cippus of Horus). Ptolemaic dynasty, c. 305-30 BC.

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  Sueno's Stone in Forres, Scotland

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  Maya stela, Quirigua

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  Kildalton Cross 800 AD Islay, Scotland

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  Cantabrian stelae 200 BC Cantabria, Spain

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  The Rosetta Stone in the British Museum

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  A Buddhist Stele from China, Northern Wei period, built in the early 6th century

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  Scythian 5th–4th c.BC. Salbyk kurgan surrounded by balbals with kurgan obelisk on the top. Upper Enisey-Irtysh interfluvial

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  1517 Shaolin stele dedicated to the mythical legend of Vajrapani's defeat of the Red Turban rebels. The Bodhisattva Guanyin (his original form) can be seen in the clouds above his head.^[12]

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  Stele from Philippi Archeology Museum

See also

Ancient Near East portal

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Steles

• Hilarri or Basque steles
• Inscription
• Kurgan stelae
• Monumental inscription
• Runestone
• Stećci
• Stele Forest, in Xi'an, China
• Stele of the Vultures
• Totem pole
• Tombstone

References

Citations

1. ^ ^{a b} Oxford English Dictionary
2. ^ Memoirs By Egypt Exploration Society Archaeological Survey of Egypt 1908, p. 19
3. ^ 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)
4. ^ Pool, op.cit., p.265
5. ^ Pool, op.cit., p.277
6. ^ Till (2005): 168.
7. ^ Endymion Wilkinson, Chinese History: A Manual (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard-Yenching Institute, 2000): 436.
8. ^ Wilkinson (2000): 436-437.
9. ^ ^{a b c} Wilkinson (2000): 437.
10. ^ de Groot, Jan Jakob Maria (1892), The Religious System of China, II, Brill Archive, pp. 451–452, http://www.archive.org/stream/religioussystem01groogoog#page/n105/mode/1up .
11. ^ ^{a b} Wilkinson (2000): 438.
12. ^ Shahar, Meir. The Shaolin Monastery: History, Religion, and the Chinese Martial Arts. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2008 (ISBN 0824831101), pp. 35-36

Bibliography

• Boardman, John, ed. The Cambridge Ancient History, Part 1, 2nd Edition, (ISBN 9780521224963 | ISBN 0-521-22496-9)
• Pool, Christopher A. Olmec Archaeology and Early Mesoamerica. Cambridge University Press, 2007 (ISBN 9780521783125)
• Till, Karen E. The New Berlin: Memory, Politics, Place. University of Minnesota Press, 2005
• Wilkinson, Endymion (2000), Chinese History: A Manual (2nd ed.), Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard-Yenching Institute, ISBN 0674002490. 

External links

• Funerary Stela