Word' and 'stone' denote fundamentally different media of cultural memory and forms of expression of the arts. They stand in tense relationships to each other; at the same time they are often worked into and related to each other. With the contributions of this volume, the outlined medial tension between the sense-media 'word' and 'stone' is examined from various disciplinary and systematic perspectives, ranging from Egyptology and archaeology to literary, linguistic and sign theory