Stele Research Articles

Shaping New Identities in the First Intermediate Period (2160–2050 BC): Archers and Warriors in the Iconography of Upper Egypt

The First Intermediate Period was a time of cultural innovation and social competition. The collapse of the monarchy and the cultural productions it sponsored paved the way for the emergence of new artistic and cultural expressions, better adapted to a context of fragile authorities and competing local powers. Warfare between rival regional polities became frequent, so tomb scenes and funerary stelae from Middle and Upper Egypt began depicting military actions and men posing as archers. Moreover, local authorities sought the support of local levies and fellow citizens to strengthen and legitimate their fragile rule. Therefore, many monuments and inscriptions celebrate successful command, effective leadership, and caring about one’s city and its inhabitants. These conditions favoured the emergence of cultural innovations and social values aiming to express new identities. Depicting weapons, mainly bows, was crucial in this respect in some areas of Southern Egypt and echoed comparable phenomena occurring in neighbour regions like Nubia and the Levant.

Markedness Effects in the Semiotactics of the Hieratic Markers of the Stone Tablets in the Christian Sacrosphere

The present article inscribes itself in the realm of the investigation of visual hieratic textuality. In the article, I use semiotactics as the methodology developed on the basis of contemporary phonology (in particular, (mor)phonotactics, e. g. Dressler and Dziubalska-Kołaczyk 2006 inter alia) to examine salient asymmetries as markedness phenomena operating on a hieratic marker active both in the Judaic denomination and in Christianity ‒ the Stone Tablets. In particular, I focus on the semiotactic reflection of the markedness effects related to the presence of the analysed marker in Catholic churches. I establish several implicational cooccurrence restrictions and arrive at establishing several primes in the nano-structure of a hieratic sign. The basis for the analysis is the digital documentation of the representation of the Stone Tablets in Christian churches which I collected in various European countries in the years 2010‒2022. The supplementary illustrative materials are available here in the form of a recorded presentation.

History of the Renovations and Reconstructions of Khurmal Mosque in ‎the archaeological and historical records (inscribed stone plaque) of Khurmal mosque as ‎an example

This paper deals with the history of the Grand Mosque of Khurmal and the origin of its name and the exact geographical location in this city which raises many research questions about its exact history, we relied on the archaeological remains, the manuscripts and the documents that deals with the mosque and its history, as well the stone plaque that commemorate the renewal of the mosque,identifying the leaders who ordered to renew the mosque for the first time, also to identifying the people who participated in the renovation of this mosque relying on the inscription on the foundation stone plaque that in a poetic style commemorates the names of three peronaltieis which are Sultan Salim, the sultan of the Ottomans, also the prince of Sulaiman Pasha of Baban, and Musa Beg was the Qaimqam of Gul’anbar district, its administrative center was in Khurmal. To prove this fact, we rely on the number of documents from the Ottoman period that shed light on the renovation of the mosque, and it appears that the mosque was renovated several times. Also, we will discuss in this paper the opinions that assume that the mosque was first built by Abdullah bin Omar al-Khattab. Our position in this study is to analyze the stone tablet and define its historical value.

A New Funerary Stele from Karkemish and New Values for Some Anatolian Hieroglyphic Signs

Karkemish is located on the West bank of Euphrates River, about 60 kilometres southeast of Gaziantep, Turkey, and 100 kilometres northeast of Aleppo, Syria. Ruins of the city, over 90 hectares, of which over 55 lie in Turkey and around 35 in Syria. Since 2011 Karkemish has been newly explored by a joint Turco-Italian Archaeological Expedition. During the 2016 excavation campaign by the Turco-Italian Archaeological Expedition at Karkemish, a fragment of a funerary stele bearing a Hieroglyphic Luwian text was unearthed in the Lower Palace area. The stele probably dates to the early eighth century BCE (reign of Yariri/Yarri) and belonged to the wife of a cultic official. In this article, after presenting an edition of the inscription in question, new values for the Anatolian hieroglyphic sign L375 (which is attested on the stele in the writing PURUS-L375-sá of the word *kummayalli(ya)s, “sacred priest”) and related signs such as L375, L144 (= *521), L74, L129, and L398 are suggested while reinterpreting several passages of hieroglyphic Luwian inscriptions from both the Empire and Late Hittite periods.

Thomas Henry Huxley, a stone tablet, coccoliths, and deep-sea sediments in the high Alps

AbstractIn the mid-1850s, Thomas Henry Huxley, who coined the term ‘coccolith’, described their presence in oceanic sediments dredged from the sea floor. Subsequent recognition of their occurrence in the Upper Cretaceous English Chalk, largely unconsolidated pelagic sediment, and similar, more lithified limestones in the Jurassic of the Alps, led to their being considered major rock-forming elements through much of geological time, although they are now known to be limited to the Late Triassic–Recent interval. Unlike Charles Darwin, who did not travel abroad following the voyage of the Beagle, Huxley made a number of trips to Italy and Switzerland and is recorded as a guest in the exclusive Hotel Kursaal Maloja in the Engadin in 1893. While staying there, he made a number of excursions on foot and his presence was thought significant enough that it is recorded in an inscribed granitic stone tablet, erected in 1896, describing him as’the illustrious writer and naturalist’. His rambles would have led him past outcrops of tectonically emplaced true oceanic calcareous sediment of Early Cretaceous age, here shown to have originally contained coccoliths that were largely destroyed under the imprint of Alpine metamorphism of sub-greenschist to greenschist facies. To this extent, Huxley could have come close to recognizing true oceanic sediments exposed on land, but the dissimilarity between these Swiss Alpine deposits and the friable English Chalk would not obviously have led to the investigation of the former for the organisms he had christened as ‘coccoliths’.

Historical descriptions of nystagmus and abnormal involuntary eye movements in various ancient cultures.

Original texts and expert translations from various ancient cultures covering a time span from the 2nd millennium BC to the ninth century AD were searched for historical observations of involuntary eye movements. Abnormal, spontaneous eye movements are an easily recognisable neuro-ophthalmological symptom that can be both congenital and acquired. Ocular oscillations termed 'hippos' by Hippocrates (460-370BC) and Galenos (129-216AD) are synonymous with nystagmus, a term first introduced in the eighteenth century. The original description of hippos suggests an innate onset, which retrospectively can be related to either congenital (infantile) nystagmus or continuous involuntary eye movements of the blind. Other descriptions of abnormal involuntary eye movements with different beating directions, possibly associated with vertigo, seizures or ear symptoms and their impact on patients' quality of life (e.g. oscillopsia, blurred vision) are preserved in many fragmentary ancient documents including papyrus scrolls and stone tablets from Egypt, Mesopotamia, India, China, Greece, Rome and the Middle East. Although the sparse original descriptions of the direction and type of eye movements may inspire daring medical interpretations, caution is required when attempting to assign them to distinct nystagmus forms according to our current clinical classification of ocular motor disorders.

A Perilous Sailing and a Lion: Comparative Evidence for a Phoenician Afterlife Motif

Abstract This essay introduces new evidence for an eschatological Phoenician motif that alludes to a final sailing and its perils, represented by a monstrous lion attacking or sinking a boat. The lion-and-boat motif was, so far, only documented in a Phoenician funerary stela from late classical Athens, the Antipatros/Shem stela. Excavations at the fifth-century BCE Tartessic site of Casas del Turuñuelo in southwestern Spain has revealed a set of ivory and bone panels that decorated a wooden box, bearing relevant iconography in the so-called orientalizing style. Additional comparanda from the Levant, Iberia, and Tunisia in various media (coins, ivories, amulets), add weight to this interpretation. Our analysis highlights how the artists behind the Athenian and Tartessic artifacts were innovative in their way of representing a theme that was not codified iconographically. Most remarkable is the use of an ivory-carving convention (the Phoenician palmette motif) to portray the stylized boat, a choice corroborated by a painted pottery sherd from Olympia. This “palmette-boat” depiction, in our view, is coherent with Egyptian Nilotic boats, but also with the use of flat or shallow river-boats in the Tagus and Guadiana region, illustrating mechanisms of local adaptation of Phoenician sailing and life-death “passing” symbolism. If, as we suggest, this representation can be added to that in the Athenian document, we now have testimonies of two different local adaptations of a Phoenician theme at the two ends of the Mediterranean oikoumene between the archaic and late classical periods.

Some New Inscriptions from the Miletus Museum

In this article, ten new inscriptions from Miletos and Didyma, housed by the Miletus Museum, are presented. Among the new finds, there are funerary stelae, a dedication inscription, a honorary inscription, a fragmentary imperial decree and a fragment of unknown nature. Except for the two inscriptions found during the road works between Akbük and Didim, we don’t have other information of the findspots of inscriptions.

Gods, Goddesses, and Mortals for the 21st Century: The Reinstallation of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts Collection of Ancient Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Art

Gods, Goddesses, and Mortals for the 21st Century: The Reinstallation of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts Collection of Ancient Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Art

BS 4142:2019 - Methods for rating and assessing industrial and commercial sound - the past, the present and future developments - a history.

BS 4142 is the UK's principal assessment method for quantifying industrial / commercial noise impact. It is surprising to realise that this standard is nearly sixty years old. The first draft of the document that was to become BS 4142 was being prepared in 1962 and was first published early in 1963 as the final report of the Wilson Committee on the problem of noise. As a young acoustician, I like many others, regarded British, and all standards in general, as tablets of stone that were immutable. As I gained in experience it became obvious that this was not true. In fact all standards are periodically reviewed, every five years in the case of a British Standard, to determine if they still reflect the current available evidence that underpins them. The current version of BS 4142 would be virtually unrecognisable to those esteemed authors of the Wilson Report all those sixty years ago. This paper traces the history of BS 4142 from its birth in the Wilson Report, through its revisions, many of which were extremely controversial at the time, to its current iteration. Change is coming with a review and potential revision in 2024 and this paper examines the current developments, both in research and standardisation, that may have significant impacts on this review process and the future development of BS 4142.

Unpublished Funerary Stela of “Osiris Nakht“ in the Egyptian Museum (JE 27784)

Unpublished Funerary Stela of “Osiris Nakht“ in the Egyptian Museum (JE 27784)

Two Christian Funerary Stelae in the Magazine at Fustât (Old Cairo)

Two Christian Funerary Stelae in the Magazine at Fustât (Old Cairo)

Study and Publishing two Funerary Stelae during The Late Period

Study and Publishing two Funerary Stelae during The Late Period

Study and Publishing two Funerary Stelae during The Late Period

Study and Publishing two Funerary Stelae during The Late Period

Coptic Funerary Stela, No.769 in the Coptic Museum, Cairo

Coptic Funerary Stela, No.769 in the Coptic Museum, Cairo

The Chapel of St. Casimir in Vilnius – A Counter-Reformation Landmark

Summary The present study takes issue with the accepted view (cf. Vikipedija) that the Chapel of St. Casimir in the Cathedral of Vilnius (1623–1636) resembles the Pauline and the Sistine Chapels in the Basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore in Rome. A closer look and comparison of the dimensions, geometry, materials, and internal décor, however, reveals significant differences. The defining architectural features of the Chapel of St. Casimir do not derive from these Baroque chapels but from multiple Biblical and Early Christian sources. (This study focused on the Chapel’s interior features that survived the 1655–1661 occupation of Vilnius.) Its cubic core recalls the twenty-cubit amplitude of the Holy of Holies in the Temple of Solomon in Jerusalem. The black marble walls (noir de Namur) allude to the blackening acacia wood of the Ark of the Covenant holding the Ten Commandment stone tablets that Moses received from the Lord on Mt. Sinai. The ox-blood colored pilasters (vieux rouge de Rance) recall the porphyry columns of the Aedicule that sheltered the Tomb of Christ in the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, Jerusalem. The Chapel’s reduced Greek cross plan derives from Vitruvius and recalls Early Christian mausoleums. The Ionic column capitals in the Chapel duplicate the ones in the entrance portals of St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome and in the Confessio above the tomb of St. Peter the Apostle in the Roman necropolis underneath the Basilica. The Council of Trent upheld Early Christian customs, precedents, and traditions. Materializing the Council’s values, the Chapel became a landmark of the Counter-Reformation. The study at hand relied heavily on the indispensable archival documents gleaned by Povilas Reklaitis, Paulius Rabikauskas, SJ, Zenonas Ivinskis, Mintautas Čiurinskas, Birutė Rūta Vitkauskienė, and Piotr Jacek Jamski.

Reclaiming the golden calf: Ritual design as creative genre

This presentation summarises how I am progressing an experimental genre of creative writing – ritual design. My project draws upon a surprisingly strong reaction I had to reading the story of the Golden Calf in Exodus 32. I am creatively engaging and changing this story. In the traditional version, while Moses receives stone tablets with God’s commandments, the Israelites, encamped at the base of Mount Sinai, celebrate around a golden calf. God is furious and plans to destroy the entire community, but Moses intercedes. Moses then passes along God’s order to the priestly tribe, the Levites: Take your swords and kill your family and neighbours who celebrated around the calf. The Levites obey and massacre about three thousand people. My project deconstructs and re-envisions this myth, as I believe this is one of the worst stories ever told, a story about slaughtering family and neighbours for heterodox expressions of religiosity. My thesis creatively engages three frameworks – amythia, death anxiety and ritual – while pursuing this driving question: How might re-envisioning the golden calf story be conceived and designed as (1) a ritualised symbolic immortality project that (2) redresses amythia and (3) regulates death anxiety? Considered together, amythia and death anxiety may foster anxiety and related psycho-social challenges, while creative symbolic immortality projects and ritualisation may mitigate these challenges. Speculatively, re-envisioning myth engages these regulatory factors; rituals of creation and rituals of engagement may help to regulate death anxiety, while the re-envisioning effort may serve as a symbolic immortality project. My methodology applies ritual design as a genre of creative writing that encourages readers to reconsider and personalise their own received mythologies and rituals. The creative component of my thesis portrays a community of priests who are changing the golden calf story and leveraging the above frameworks to inform their religious practice.

Research on the Style of Duan Inkstone Inscription in Tang Dynasty

Under the background of the Tang Dynasty, regular script has developed into the most coordinated and stable calligraphy style through three periods of transition. This most stable regular script style is suitable for the inscriptions of stone tablets and Duan inkstone in the Tang Dynasty. During this transition, the inheritance and breakthrough in the early Tang Dynasty gave rise to the standardized embryonic form of regular script in the Tang Dynasty. Entering the middle of the Tang Dynasty, regular script was further innovated and developed, strengthening stability. It was not until the late Tang Dynasty was innovated and perfected, and the essence of the early stage was absorbed. During the transition period of regular script in the entire Tang Dynasty, on the basis of inheritance, there was a breakthrough and development. A stable development law was formed with changes in stability and changes in stability.

Jeremiah the Suffering Prophet - his Communication of Judgment and Promise of Blessings

The Book of Jeremiah is the second of the Prophets in the Christian Old Testament. The prophet Jeremiah witnessed first-hand, a nation struggling to survive. Jeremiah comes through plainly as a person contemplating his role as a servant of Yahweh with scant good news for his people. Jeremiah's heart-rending message is communicated by both his prophecies and account of Jerusalem's destruction. Jeremiah’s prophecies are unambiguous and pessimistic and aimed at rebuking people who had become idolatrous and debauched. Yahweh appointed Jeremiah to proclaim the destruction and building of a nation that would ultimately lead to His Kingdom. He thus also offers his people hope and his prophetic warnings are also promises that returning to Yahweh will lead the people to divine blessings and he states that Yahweh will eventually honour his pledge with the Jews. “For I know the plans I have for you,” declares the Lord, “plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.” (Jeremiah 29:11). For forty years Jeremiah preached to the unrepented Judah and Israel. Jeremiah used verbal communication to challenge the religious hypocrisy, economic dishonesty, and oppressive practice of Judah leaders and those who followed them. The article concludes that Jeremiah’s experiences prepared him and put him in good state to comprehend resources which Yahweh provides. He fought throughout his life and he attained lofty spiritual levels demonstrating his piety. His prophetic career coincided with the last years of Judah’s independence before it was overrun by the Babylonians. Jeremiah prophesied that Yahweh would make a covenant with Israel, superseding the old Mosaic Covenant; Yahweh would then write his law on the hearts of men rather than on stone tablets and they would all come to know Him directly and receive his compassion and forgiveness. Jeremiah was an effective prophet who could clearly communicate his vision based on Yahweh’s wishes, and he provided constructive feedback to people, and strongly stated what people needed to do. This brief study primarily employs a literature study, and a biblical-theological approach to interpreting the book of Jeremiah is also integrated. His communication strategy is also unpacked as it ensured that the people had suitable information about Yahweh’ wishes, towards maintaining close steadiness in their lives and preventing any ambiguity as to the outcome of iniquity and also Yahweh’s promises to a faithful people.

Four Coptic-Greek Funerary Stelae in the British Museum

Four funerary stelae of the eighth century AD now in the British Museum have previously been assigned to Abydos on the basis that they are all connected to the monastery of the local saint, Apa Moses. This article questions this assumption. A text edition and study of the common features of the stelae suggest that, although they probably do come from the same cemetery, its location is uncertain, and the provenance of Abydos cannot be proven.