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A stele (plural steles or stelai, from Greek: , ''stēlē''〔The Greek plural is , ''stēlai'', but this is only rarely encountered in English.〕) or stela (plural stelas or stelæ, from Latin) is a stone or wooden slab, generally taller than it is wide, erected as a monument, very often for funerary or commemorative purposes. Stelae may be used for government notices or as territorial markers to mark borders or delineate land ownership. They very often have texts and may have decoration. This ornamentation may be inscribed, carved in relief (bas, high, etc.), or painted onto the slab. Traditional Western gravestones are technically stelae, but are very rarely described by the term. Equally stelae-like forms in non-Western cultures may be called by other terms, and "stela" is most consistently used for objects from Europe, the ancient Near East and Egypt, China, and Pre-Columbian America.〔Collon〕 ==History== 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,〔''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 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〔Pool, ''op.cit.'', p.265〕 and Maya.〔Pool, ''op.cit.'', p.277〕 The huge number of steles, including inscriptions, surviving from ancient Egypt and in Central America constitute one of the largest and most significant sources of information on those civilisations, in particular Maya stelae. The most famous example of an inscribed stela leading to increased understanding is the Rosetta Stone, which led to the breakthrough allowing Egyptian hieroglyphs to be read. An informative stele of Tiglath-Pileser III is preserved in the British Museum. Two steles built into the walls of a church are major documents relating to the Etruscan language. Unfinished standing stones (menhirs), 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 steles''. Totem poles of North and South America that are made out of stone are also a specialized type of stele. Gravestones, typically with inscribed name and often with inscribed epitaph, are among the most common types of stele seen in Western culture. 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 steles.〔Till (2005): 168.〕 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. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「stele」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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