STELE
(STEE-lee)
An
upright stone used as a monument
Common
clues: Votive
stone; Ancient Roman burial stone; Inscribed pillar; Engraved
marker; Memorial marker; Upright slab; Ancient monument
Crossword
puzzle frequency:
2 times a year
Frequency
in English language:
73414 / 86800
Video:
Lost
king of the Maya
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 (bas-relief,
sunken-relief, high-relief, etc), or painted onto the slab.
King
Ezana's Stele in Axum, Ethiopia.
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.
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.
This
article is licensed under the GNU
Free Documentation License.
It uses material from the Wikipedia
article "Stele".
STELE
(102)
19 We >1 06 Inscribed pillar STELA
16
Tu+ >1 07 Stone marker CAIRN
9
Mo+ >1 06 Engraved pillar STELA STLLE
5
Fr- >1 08 Memorial marker
5
Th+ >1 99 Stone pillar STELA
4
We >1 04 Commemorative marker
4
Mo+ >1 04 Inscribed stone STELA
00
Inscribed stone marker
3
We+ >1 96 Stone monument CAIRN
3
Tu >1 05 Upright slab
2
Th NYT 95 Ancient monument
2
Fr- NYT 09 Archaeological find RELIC SHARD
2
Fr NYT 96 Commemorative stone
2
Th- NYT 95 Grave marker STELA STONE
01
Inscribed stone slab
2
Th NYT 01 Marker NOTER
2
Th WaP 00 Monument
2
We- >1 96 Stone slab
1
Th LAT 09 "O Rare Ben Johnson" is engraved (in error)
on one
1
Fr NYT 06 Ancient burial stone
1
Fr LAT 97 Ancient pillar
1
Th LAT 04 Carved pillar STELA
1
Tu NYT 96 Carved stone slab
1
Fr NYT 05 Commemorative piece
1
Sa NYT 87 Commemorative pillar STELA
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