In 1830, the viceroy of Egypt gifted France a 3,300-year-old Egyptian obelisk—a carved stone pillar with a pyramidal top. In 1836, the obelisk found its home in Paris, in Place de la Concorde. One would think that after standing in the center of the French capital for almost 200 years, Parisian Egyptologists would have learned all there is to discover about the ancient monument. But it turns out the famous obelisk still has its secrets.
Jean-Guillaume Olette-Pelletier, an Egyptologist and cryptologist from the Catholic University of Paris, claims to have discovered seven previously undocumented messages carved into the 13th-century BCE Luxor Obelisk. Altogether, the inscriptions were intended to establish Pharaoh Ramses II’s divine authority in the eyes of the ancient Egyptian elite. The discovery and its interpretation were first reported by French media, and the researcher aims to further detail his findings in a paper forthcoming in the journal ENiM (Egypt of the Nile and Mediterranean).
Olette-Pelletier identified the inscriptions in December 2021, when the obelisk was surrounded by renovation scaffolding. The scaffolding allowed Olette-Pelletier to observe the monument’s highest inscriptions, close to its golden pyramid-shaped top. According to EuroWeekly, it was when Olette-Pelletier attempted to read the hieroglyphs horizontally, rather than vertically, that he began to spot previously unidentified inscriptions.
Some (perhaps all) of the new messages were hidden in the hieroglyphs themselves, a technique known as “crypto-hieroglyphs” used by the ancient Egyptian elite that today only six Egyptologists in the world are able to interpret, according to La Brújula Verde.
“People had not noticed that under [one of the drawings] of the god Amun, there is an offering table. This allows us to discover a sentence where no element is missing: an offering that the king gives to the god Amun,” Olette-Pelletier told BFMTV. Combinations of the newly identified inscriptions produce additional meanings in what’s called three-dimensional cryptography. In total, the Egyptologist identified seven encrypted messages across the obelisk’s various facades. He explained that the enigmatic text can only be understood by walking around the monument.
Additionally, the messages in question can only be seen from a specific angle. In particular, when the obelisk stood at the entrance of Egypt’s Luxor Temple, one of the messages would have been visible to vessels sailing on the Nile, according to EuroWeekly. This suggests that the message, exalting Pharaoh Ramses II’s divine power, was intended for elite individuals arriving by boat. Another inscription encourages viewers to make divine offerings to appease the gods’ anger.
Overall, the secret inscriptions highlight Ramses II’s power, victories, longevity, and his appeasement of the gods through word-play from well-known papyrus texts. “These messages are a form of propaganda in favor of the builder of the site: Pharaoh Ramses II,” Olette-Pelletier told Le Point. He argues that Ramses II wanted to further legitimize his divine claim to power in the eyes of the noble class, as reported by EuroWeekly.
Ramses II ruled from 1279 to 1213 BCE and is one of ancient Egypt’s most famous pharaohs. The Luxor Obelisk in Paris is one of two that he erected at the entrance of what today is known as the Luxor Temple—the second obelisk remains in Egypt.
Ultimately, Olette-Pelletier’s discovery highlights that even the most familiar ancient monuments still hold secrets left for us to unravel.
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