Lunette (stele)
Curved top region of a stele
The lunette spatial region in the upper portion of steles, became common for steles as a prelude to a stele's topic. Its major use was from ancient Egypt in all the various categories of steles: funerary, Victory steles, autobiographical, temple, votive, etc.
The lunettes are most common from ancient Egyptian steles, as not only is the topic of the stele presented, but honorific gods, presenters, individuals, etc. are previewed, and often with Egyptian hieroglyphic statements.
The main body of the stele is then presented below, often separated with a horizontal line (register), but not always. In Egyptian steles, many have horizontal lines of hieroglyphs; often the lunette will contain shorter vertical statements in hieroglyphs, sometimes just names of the individuals portrayed, hieroglyphs in front, or behind the individual.
0119th Dynasty Egypt, post Amarna
From the post-Amarna period onwards, many personal steles made exhortations to the ancient Egyptian deities; steles to specific gods "were erected to intervene personally with the local god, often to seek justice or offer an explanation for things that had gone wrong in their lives. The deceased is shown kneeling, holding up his hands in prayer, ....." Some of the personal votive steles had ears (hieroglyphs), to represent the gods listening to the supplicant.
Sources and credits
This article is adapted from the Wikipedia article “Lunette (stele)”, written by its contributors and licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. Fathomly has changed the layout, removed citation markers, navigation and maintenance notices, and adjusted punctuation. This adapted version is shared under the same license. For references, see the original article.
Images, from Wikimedia Commons:
- Piye Stele (Louvre Museum reconstruction).jpg by Tangopaso, Public domain
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