Wednesday Word

stele (stē' lē, also stēl) 1. an upright stone slab or pillar engraved with an inscription or design and used as a monument, grave marker, etc. 2. Archit. a prepared surface, as on a facade, having an inscription, carved design, etc. 3. Bot. a central cylinder of vascular tissues in the stems and roots of plants

Having recently read Gods, Graves and Scholars by C.W. Ceram, I'm mostly interested in the first two definitions (although I listed #3 for completeness).

Imagine you are thrashing your way through the thickest jungle and you come across a great big rock carved with ornamentation and figures that are unlike anything anyone has seen or recorded in known history.  This is just what happend in the late 1830's to John Lloyd Stephens and Frederick Catherwood as they were searching for the Mayan city of Copán in what is now Honduras:

Stephens and Catherwood themselves now took machetes and set about getting a clearer view.  They found themselves before a stele, a high and richly carved slab of stone.  In artistry of execution there was nothing in Europe or Asia to compete with it.  Such sculpture had never been even remotely suspected on the American continent.
     The ornamentation on the stone likeness was magnificent beyond description.

Stephens and Catherwood eventually found thirteen more of these magnificent stones.  Since they could not haul them out of the jungle (and I, for one, am glad of that) it was left to Catherwood, an experienced draftsman to make a drawing of one of the darn things. The images before him were so beyond his experience that he nearly drove himself crazy trying to create an accurate depiction.

I suppose the next time something like this could happen it would have to be on another planet...or in a far, far future when super-evolved humans try to figure out why us ancients carved out so many sets of golden arches. And in either case the discoverers will probably have digital cameras.