Word: stela
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...cults?emphasizing instead the need to preserve "unique artifacts of China's history for future generations." Yong Xin clearly has his eye on the value of the franchise. He wants Shaolin to be named a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and he has restored many of its monuments, including a stela that dates to the early Tang dynasty, a pagoda-style bell tower and the Talin, or Stupa Forest, an aptly named field of richly inscribed monks' tombs. But he doesn't have a light touch. Last summer when he wanted to restore Shaolin's bucolic backdrop, he bulldozed most...
...Tamil and Persian praise Buddha, Shiva and Allah in equal measure. According to the tributes, alms to each deity - 1,000 pieces of gold, 5,000 of silver, rolls of embroidered silk and taffeta, gold vases and scented oil - were offered in scrupulously identical lots. The offerings and the stela, erected by Zheng He on his third trip to the island, were failed bids at diplomacy. When his efforts were frustrated by the fractious locals, too busy fighting each other to pay adequate obeisance to the admiral, he invaded and captured one of their warrior leaders. Today religious and ethnic...
...years ago. Only with these new tools, like the bow and arrow and the spear thrower, could our ancestors begin to mimic the speed and sharpness of a big cat's claws. Even so, predator animals remained a major threat. As late as the 7th century B.C., a stela erected by the Assyrian King Assurbanipal recounts the ferocity of the lions and tigers after torrential rains had flushed them out of their lairs; the great King, of course, stamped out the beasts...
...third and innermost chamber, the sanctuary where only priests and an occasional petitioner entered, is bare except for a stela representing the two brothers with Osiris and Isis. A concealed chamber behind it may have contained the embalmed bodies of the brothers or, as some suggest, may have been used by a hidden priest to make oracular pronouncements to impress the faithful. But few of them would ever have heard him. For unlike a Christian church, the Egyptian temple was not designed for worshipers to gather to pray. Rather, it was a house built for the god himself...
Finding their newly discovered stela too heavy to cart away intact, the thieves cut it into six pieces with chain saws. Then, along with the rest of their booty, they load the chunks onto burros and head for the border. Within days their contraband enters the flourishing black market in pre-Columbian antiquities, to be bought by rich collectors in the U.S., Western Europe or Japan...