A French Egyptologist has unlocked what he says are seven secret messages in the hieroglyphs on the Luxor Obelisk, the 3,000-year-old Egyptian monument on the Place de la Concorde in central Paris, reports The Times.
Jean-Guillaume Olette-Pelletier, a hieroglyphic cryptology specialist at Sorbonne University, decoded inscriptions and images on the 22.5-metre tall red granite monolith that can be read together as messages that projected the power of Pharaoh Ramses II.
One, on the west face, designed to be seen only by aristocrats who were passing on boats on the Nile, is “a real propaganda message on the absolute sovereignty of Ramses”, the 37-year-old researcher said.
One of a pair coveted by Napoleon Bonaparte in 1798 after he invaded Egypt, the obelisk was given to France by Pasha Muhammed Ali, ruler of Ottoman Egypt, in 1830. It was erected in 1836 on the square that was home to the main guillotine during the French revolution.
The Egyptian hieroglyphs — carved pictures and symbols that were the ancestor of modern writing systems — were translated in the 1820s by drawing on the breakthroughs made by Jean-François Champollion, an Egyptologist, in his work deciphering the Rosetta Stone —the stele of Greek and Egyptian languages that was seized by the British from the French in Egypt in 1801 and brought to the British Museum in 1802.
However, Olette-Pelletier believed there were hidden messages in the inscriptions, and began to scrutinise them on daily walks around the obelisk during the pandemic. Scaffolding on the monument that was put up during renovations before the 2024 Paris Olympics enabled him to study vital clues near the top.
Read more of this report from The Times.