What isStela?

A stela (plural stelae, from the Greek stēlē, a standing block) is an upright slab of stone carved with words or images. People have raised them for thousands of years, on every continent, so that a memory would outlast the people who raised it: to honour the dead, to record a reign, to set out laws, to mark a boundary or a sacred place.

The archive holds several. The laws of Hammurabi were carved on a stela of basalt. The Rosetta Stone is a broken piece of one. The great obelisk of Aksum is a stela, raised over the royal tombs of an African kingdom. Stela is a stone of the same kind, raised for all of humanity.

Stela gathers fragments of human life from every continent and every age, from the first stone tools to artificial intelligence: objects, places, texts and gestures, each with its dates, its sources and what remains of it today. They are arranged in six halls (We built, We discovered, We imagined, We changed the world, What we lost, What we leave behind), along a timeline, on a map and in guided journeys, in English and in French.

Every fragment cites at least two sources, at least one of them scholarly or institutional, and says what is established and what is interpretation. The archive is free to visit, with no advertising, no tracking and no account.

Artificial intelligence, biotechnology and robotics may change what it means to be human. Stela keeps the memory of what we were and what we did, so that the story of humanity is not forgotten, and asks every visitor the question a stela asks: what will remain of us in 100, 1,000 or 10,000 years?

The sign of Stela is a hand on a stone: the negative hand that people pressed against cave walls and outlined in pigment, the oldest way of saying I was here, set on a stela.

Stela is published by Gulpes. It is also called Stela World, after its address, stela.world. To write to the archive: info@stela.world.