What is the cross?

Wherever you go, You wll most likely see a cross hanging up somewhere. Weather in a persons home, a business, or elsewhere, you will see it. However, Deep study of the Bible will show that it was not a cross, but a tree, or stake, that which he was hung upon. Where did the cross come from? and why do people always use it? The Encyclopædia Britannica in 1946, Volume 6, Page 753 says: “Various objects, dating from periods long anterior to the Christian era, have been found, marked with crosses of different designs, in almost every part of the old world. India, Syria, Persia and Egypt have all yielded numberless examples . . . The use of the cross as a religious symbol in pre-Christian times and among non-Christian peoples may probably be regarded as almost universal, and in very many cases it was connected with some form of nature worship." The Cross in Ritual, Architecture, and Art, London, 1900, G. S. Tyack, p. 1. Brings out however:“It is strange, yet unquestionably a fact, that in ages long before the birth of Christ, and since then in lands untouched by the teaching of the Church, the Cross has been used as a sacred symbol. . . . The Greek Bacchus, the Tyrian Tammuz, the Chaldean Bel, and the Norse Odin, were all symbolised to their votaries by a cruciform device.” If this s the case, then should we view it as just for Christ? Although, by studying deeply and analyzing the facts and all from the original texts of the Bible, then we will be able to find the truth and the fact.
The Greek word rendered “cross” in many modern Bible versions is stau‧ros′. In classical Greek, this word meant merely an upright stake, or pale. The Imperial Bible-Dictionary acknowledges this, saying: “The Greek word for cross, [stau‧ros′], properly signified a stake, an upright pole, or piece of paling, on which anything might be hung, or which might be used in impaling [fencing in] a piece of ground. . . . Even amongst the Romans the crux (from which our cross is derived) appears to have been originally an upright pole.”—P. Fairbairn London, 1874, Vol. I, p. 376.

The book The Non-Christian Cross, by J. D. Parsons In 1896 says: “There is not a single sentence in any of the numerous writings forming the New Testament, which, in the original Greek, bears even indirect evidence to the effect that the stauros used in the case of Jesus was other than an ordinary stauros; much less to the effect that it consisted, not of one piece of timber, but of two pieces nailed together in the form of a cross. . . . It is not a little misleading upon the part of our teachers to translate the word stauros as ‘cross’ when rendering the Greek documents of the Church into our native tongue, and to support that action by putting ‘cross’ in our lexicons as the meaning of stauros without carefully explaining that that was at any rate not the primary meaning of the word in the days of the Apostles, did not become its primary signification till long afterwards, and became so then, if at all, only because, despite the absence of corroborative evidence, it was for some reason or other assumed that the particular stauros upon which Jesus was executed had that particular shape.”