Stelae: Ancient Egypt's Versatile Monumental Form By Jen Thum | Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology and the Ancient World, Brown University

A stela is an upright monument containing information in the form of texts, images or a combination of the two. Stelae have been used to commemorate people or events, to delineate physical spaces or as objects through which to access the dead or divine. Such monuments were made by a variety of cultures in the ancient world, including the Assyrians, Maya, Greeks and Romans. The most common Egyptian term for a stela is wedj, which originally meant “command” and stems from wedj–nesu, “royal decree.” Various qualifiers could be used to further classify wedj, such as wedj-her-tash – “boundary stela” – or wedj-en-nekhtu – “victory stela.” Several other terms, including ahau (from aha, “to stand”), were also used to describe this type of monument.

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