Word: stelae
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Bikila's triumph was all the more stunning because it happened in the capital of Ethiopia's former military occupier. Legend has it that he made his decisive move in the race just as he passed the Axum Obelisk, a towering stela that Mussolini had brought back from Ethiopia as war loot. Four years later in Tokyo, Bikila won gold again, the first man to defend his Olympic marathon title. This time he wore shoes...
...rulers. By the early 18th century B.C., Hammurabi, the sixth King of Babylon, had used an aggressive military policy to conquer rival city-states and to establish Babylon as Mesopotamia's political heart. But Hammurabi was concerned about more than expansion, as demonstrated by the magnificent Code of Hammurabi stela, a 7-ft.-high (2 m) column of basalt upon which he inscribed 282 codified laws and punishments in cuneiform, the Babylonian script that predates even hieroglyphics. Although its prescriptions sound cruel today ("If a man commits a robbery and is caught, that man will be killed"), it helped...
...archaeologists, who complain that simply by providing a commercial market for ancient objects, museums and private collectors encourage looters who vandalize archaeological digs, removing the artifacts from surroundings that hold clues about the culture that made them. To most people, a Mesopotamian cult figure or a Maya stela, before it's anything else, is a work of art. To an archaeologist, it's first a crucial piece of a much larger puzzle, the puzzle that is history itself. And theft breaks the puzzle into pieces that can never be put back together. "Archaeologists are concerned about all the other information...
ENIGMA IN STONE Koguryo's King Changsu, was rightly proud of his father's achievements, and filial the way a good son should be. Shortly after his father's death in battle, in 412, Changsu erected a monumental stone stela to honor the fallen King's military accomplishments. The Kwanggaet'o stela remains Ji'an's most controversial and popular attraction. Ever since the stela's rediscovery by Chinese officials in the late 19th century, the interpretation of its text has been a source of dispute between Chinese, Korean and Japanese scholars. The Japanese claim that the carefully etched script...
...stela is of daunting dimensions: nearly eight meters high and of equal girth. Each of its almost 1,800 Chinese characters is larger than a human hand. Despite its imposing size, this immense bone of contention is not easy to find. So I turn to a local resident for guidance. She directs me to the stela's resting place-an open, peak-roofed pavilion hidden behind a high wall only a few paces from her home. "The taiwangbei," she pronounces, with a flourish. "The stela of the great King." That's how the locals know it. Which King...