‘Can you tell us what a stela [pronounced stealer] is and describe it for us?’ Misha Glenny asked the learned guest Fran Reynolds on In Our Time, blessedly continuing after Lord Bragg’s long innings as presenter. The episode was on Hammurabi, King of Babylon.
Professor Reynolds managed to get quite far before saying: ‘There’s the most beautifully carved cuneiform inscription on the stele [pronounced steely].’ Misha Glenny then mentioned that in Paris, the week before, he had gone to ‘see the stele, as I gather it’s pronounced’, on which Hammurabi’s laws are carved. Later he picked up the courage to return to stela.
It’s a word that has been used in English since the 1760s in the form stela, which is the Latin equivalent of the Greek stele, ‘a standing block or slab’. To make matters more confused, while the preferred term is stele (in the judgment of the OED), the usual plural in English is stelae, which is formally the plural of stela. As for pronunciation, stele was often pronounced in early usage as one syllable, like steel.
‘Anything to do with Simeon Stylites?’ asked my husband, eager to show he was keeping up. The answer is No. And Yes.
Stylites were ascetics who lived on pillars. Stulos is Greek for a pillar. (The upsilon vowel becomes y in English.) But the Greeks got themselves in a muddle between stulos, ‘pillar’ and stilos, ‘pen’. According to Galen, in the 2nd century ad, Alexandrian Greeks also used stulos (ordinarily ‘pillar’) to mean ‘a pen’, like the Latin stilus. But Latin speakers used in addition the alternative form stylus for stilus, ‘pen’. From that, we get in English the meaning ‘manner of writing’, hence the sense ‘fashion’, with hairstyle and the Style Council. In any case Greek stulos, ‘pillar’, derives from an Indo-European word that gave us the base for the English stand. (The ancient Greek stauros, ‘a cross’, came from the same origin, and gives us the name Stavros.) And the Greek stele, which is where we came in, derives from the same Indo-European word. That is the sense in which my husband’s suggestion was right, surprisingly.
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