From Egyptian tombs to Maya plazas, upright slabs of stone kept the records
A stele is simply a slab, usually taller than it is wide, set upright and covered in carving, painting or text. Egypt and Mesopotamia raised them, while China and the Maya seem to have hit on the same idea separately. One inscribed example, the Rosetta Stone, unlocked the reading of Egyptian hieroglyphs.
The uses were remarkably varied. Stelae marked graves, published laws and decrees, trumpeted a ruler's deeds, fixed field boundaries and national borders, and celebrated victories; Greek and Roman governments even used them as public notice boards. Akhenaten ringed his city of Amarna with boundary stelae. The habit never quite died: more than half a dozen stand on the Waterloo battlefield, and the ordinary Western gravestone is essentially a modern stele, though few people call it that.
Egypt produced them from the First Dynasty onward, mostly in limestone or sandstone, sometimes granite or diorite, and later in wood. Tomb stelae were the biggest group, typically showing the owner with family beside a prayer and a list of titles. In Old Kingdom mastabas, dated 2686 to 2181 BC, they served as false doors through which the dead could receive offerings. The Merneptah Stele contains the earliest known historical reference to the Israelites, and Ptolemaic decrees were carved in hieroglyphs, demotic and Greek, as on the Rosetta Stone.
Further east, the Iron Age kingdom of Urartu, spread across the Armenian Highlands between the 9th and 6th centuries BC, raised freestanding stone stelae with cuneiform inscriptions; one from a niche at Van recorded the annals of Sarduri II year by year. Some were later reused as Christian Armenian gravestones, and scholars have suggested they influenced the Armenian khachkar. In Athens around 600 BC, funerary stelae often showed a single idealised figure such as an athlete, before later ones shifted to family scenes like the Stele of Hegeso.
The family is wide. Obelisks, the Insular high crosses of Ireland and Britain and stone totem poles can all count as specialised stelae, while Scotland's intricately carved Pictish stones date from the 6th to 9th centuries. In Berlin, Peter Eisenman turned the form into a memorial to the murdered Jews of Europe: a field of some 2,700 steles left deliberately blank.
Source: Stele
