Steles

A stele (/ˈstili/, STEE-lee) is a stone or wooden slab, generally taller than it is wide, erected in ancient Western culture as a monument, very often for funerary or commemorative purposes ("grave steles"). Stelae as slabs of stone may also be used for ancient Greek and Latin government notices or as territorial markers to mark borders or delineate land ownership. The surface of the stele may very often have text and/ or have ornamentation. This ornamentation may be inscribed, carved in relief, or painted onto the slab. Traditional Western gravestones may technically be considered the modern equivalent of ancient stelae, though the term is very rarely applied in this way. Equally, stelae-like forms in non-Western cultures may be called by other terms, and the words "stele" and "stelae" are most consistently applied in archaeological contexts to objects from Europe, the ancient Near East and Egypt, China, and sometimes Pre-Columbian America.

Steles have also been used to publish laws and decrees, to record a ruler's exploits and honors, to mark sacred territories or mortgaged properties, as territorial markers, as the boundary steles of Akhenaton at Amarna, or to commemorate military victories. They were widely used in the Ancient Near East, Mesopotamia, Greece, Egypt, Somalia, Eritrea, Ethiopia, and, most likely independently, in China and elsewhere in the Far East, and, more surely independently, by Mesoamerican civilisations, notably the Olmec and Maya.

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