Steles have also been used to publish laws and decrees, to record a ruler's exploits and honors, to

mark sacred territories or mortgaged properties, as territorial markers, as the boundary steles
of Akhenaton at Amarna,[2] or to commemorate military victories.[3] They were widely used in
the Ancient Near East, Mesopotamia, Greece, Egypt, Somalia, Eritrea, Ethiopia, and, most likely
independently, in China and elsewhere in the Far East, and, independently,
by Mesoamerican civilisations, notably the Olmec[4] and Maya.[5]

Stela of Iddi-Sin, King of Simurrum. It dates back to the Old Babylonian Period. From Qarachatan Village,
Sulaymaniyah Governorate, Iraqi Kurdistan. The Sulaymaniyah Museum, Iraq

The large number of steles, including inscriptions, surviving from ancient Egypt and in Central
America constitute one of the largest and most significant sources of information on those
civilisations, in particular Maya stelae. The most famous example of an inscribed stela leading to
increased understanding is the Rosetta Stone, which led to the breakthrough allowing Egyptian
hieroglyphs to be read. An informative stele of Tiglath-Pileser III is preserved in the British Museum.
Two steles built into the walls of a church are major documents relating to the Etruscan language.
Standing stones (menhirs), set up without inscriptions from Libya in North Africa to Scotland, were
monuments of pre-literate Megalithic cultures in the Late Stone Age. The Pictish stones of Scotland,
often intricately carved, date from between the 6th and 9th centuries.
An obelisk is a specialized kind of stele. The Insular high
crosses of Ireland and Britain are specialized steles. Totem poles of North and South America that
are made out of stone may also be considered a specialized type of stele. Gravestones, typically
with inscribed name and often with inscribed epitaph, are among the most common types of stele
seen in Western culture.
Most recently, in the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin, the architect Peter
Eisenman created a field of some 2,700 blank steles.[6] The memorial is meant to be read not only as
the field, but also as an erasure of data that refer to memory of the Holocaust.