Stele

At another time it is a king of Kis who makes offerings to the god of Nippur, in gratitude for his victories.

To this period belongs the famous Stela of the Vultures, found at Tello, on which is depicted the victory of E. Dinger-Anajin, the king of Lagos, Tello, over the Semitic hordes of the land of the bow.

It may be noted that the recent discoveries have shown how correct Professor Maspero has been in assigning the kings of Lagos to a period earlier than that of Sargon of Akkad.

Professor Hilprecht would place E. Dinger-Anajin after Lugal-Zagizi, and sees in the Stela of the Vultures a monument of the revenge taken by the Sumerian rulers of Lagos for the conquest of the country by the inhabitants of the north.

But it is equally possible that it marks the successful reaction of Chaldea against the power established by Lugal-Zagizi.

However this may be, the dynasty of Lagos, to which Professor Hilprecht has added a new king, End-Kegil, reigned in peace for some time, and belonged to the same age as the first dynasty of Ur.

The institution of divine kingship, which had structured political life for centuries, collapsed.

Stele stopped being erected.

The elite culture that produced the towering pyramids and the elaborate carved monuments faded from the southern Paten region.

But the people did not vanish.

this is very interesting.

Let's start with the House of David Stele.

Is that how you say it?

Yeah.

That's good.

I like that.

Stele is a good, uh, some people pronounce it Stella, and others Stel.

Um, I like, I think it's British pronunciation, Stele.

So the word Kem itself was a mask.

Wendell tells us that she was initially working on a translation of the Stele of Kem, when she felt something was off.

She drew a card from the Book of Thoth and got the actor a masquerade.

Kem may be a word, but it wears a mask.

He becomes the red Magnus.

He travels in perfect wisdom.

Two lines on the Stele of Kephur say that mastery of the will of Set is the will of Set, and that those who do so will live in the company of the elect.

In Wendell's reading of this dele, she notes that Kemset is naked before Set and Kem, symbolizing that he can do nothing to hide, his existence is open before both.

He holds a sealed papyrus, waiting to be read and the name to be known.

The Stele of Khem depicts a faceless god named Netrkhem whose name is unknown, who is described as the initiate ahead of his self.

This seems to suggest that Khem is both a goal and a projection, something you're becoming, but also something that already exists in some sense.

How does this paradox work? If Khem is the self ahead of itself, does that mean the goal is predetermined, or is it something you're actively creating as you go? This is the deepest paradox at the heart of the chem philosophy.

They're excavating the city of Dan and they found... a stela, right, like a little stone inscribed monumental text, not Israelite, Aramean, right, from the 9th century, like 850 BCE, around there, by an Aramean king talking about how he had successfully conquered, you know, and fought battles against the northern kingdom of Israel, and also he says, and also against the house of David, which is to say, right, like the, you know, the southern kingdom of Israel, of Judah.

And that's a pretty amazing thing, right, to have a foreigner say the house of David when they have no stake in the question of whether David was real or not.

Now, you can imagine a world in which israelites had already started thinking about themselves as like a davidic dynasty even if david didn't exist but it's really it's a weird thing to say that would be like you know like our cultural historical memory like we go back to you know whatever george washington and that's 250 years ago um and you know like this it would be weird to create a mythological founder like a couple of generations back people would know so the idea that a foreigner would be referring to the house of david does to me suggest that there probably was someone named david whom that dynasty traced itself back to again it says nothing about the historicity of the david story that we have um it doesn't say anything about the extent of his kingdom or his power uh but it does suggest there probably was a david who was a king and maybe a founder at least of a dynasty that was this, this Stela, this Tel Dan Stela it's called, um, was so much, obviously like a force in favor of David's historicity that the scholars who didn't think David existed tried to argue that it was like a forgery or it was much later, or it didn't really say that all of which is, you know, sort of like, I think like making clear that if this thing is legit, it's pretty good evidence for a David, uh, That's just about it, though.

That stela is just about the only thing that says David outside of the Bible.

There's a possibility that another stela like that from around the same time also says David, but that one's much less obvious.

The roses are round and soft, not like the geometric crosses you see in Gondar's later work.

From the cathedral ruins, I climbed the slight hill toward Mussolini's Stele, that twenty-meter obelisk the Italians left behind in the nineteen-forties.

It stands at the approach to town, a strange, arrogant monument to a failed occupation.

The overcast light made it look even more out of place, and I thought about how Gorgora has absorbed so many layers: the capital, the mission, the invasion, and now a new eco resort.

At another time it is a king of Kis who makes offerings to the god of Nippur, in gratitude for his victories.

To this period belongs the famous Stela of the Vultures, found at Tello, on which is depicted the victory of E. Dinger-Ana-Jin, the king of Lagos, Tello, over the Semitic hordes of the land of the bow.

It may be noted that the recent discoveries have shown how correct Professor Maspero has been in assigning the kings of Lagos to a period earlier than that of Sargon of Akkad.

Professor Hilprecht would place E. Dinger-Ana-Jin after Lugal-Zagizi, and sees in the Stela of the Vultures a monument of the revenge taken by the Sumerian rulers of Lagos for the conquest of the country by the inhabitants of the north.

But it is equally possible that it marks the successful reaction of Chaldea against the power established by Lugal-Zagizi.

However this may be, the dynasty of Lagos, to which Professor Hilprecht has added a new king, En-Kegil, reigned in peace for some time, and belonged to the same age as the first dynasty of Ur.

And I remember when I really got into it just sitting there staring at all of these stele.

And you might be wondering, what are stelae? What's a stela? So stelae is a plural.

Stela is the singular for one.

A stela is essentially a slab that's been decorated in some way.

So typically we think of stone ones, but the ancient Egyptians sometimes made wood ones as well.