Ancient Monument: What is a Stele?

I worked at the ancient city of Nimrud, capital of the Assyrian Empire in the 9th and 8th centuries BCE, in late March to early May of 2023. The excavation was directed by Dr. Michael Danti and supported by the Penn Museum and University Research Foundation. We worked in conjunction with the Iraq State Board of Antiquities and Heritage throughout.

While there I filmed several of our finds and excavation units. Here I talk about a stele we uncovered in the Temple of Ishtar. A stele is a stone monument, often with a curved top and relief decoration. Some are inscribed, but this one is not. It's also rather broken but we are finding other pieces of it in the surrounding soil.

This stele had been exposed before; it was at the edge of a pit dug by the so-called Islamic State (ISIS) in 2016. They cut into the temple with machines in search of antiquities to sell. They may have damaged the stele in the process, but there is also evidence that it might have been defaced in the ancient past.

Nimrud was destroyed in 612 BCE and the temple was sacked and burned at that time. We're now cleaning up the ISIS destruction and investigating the temple in a scientific manner to learn more about it and the Neo-Assyrian people.

00:00 intro
00:21 what is a stele
01:25 condition of the stele
02:01 Ishtar fragment
03:28 finding the stele
04:19 detailed carving
05:31 purpose and meaning?
06:12 wrap-up and outro