HIDDEN MESSAGES FOUND ON A 3,000-YEAR-OLD OBELISK BY AN EGYPTOLOGIST
A French Egyptologist has deciphered hidden messages on a 3,000-year-old obelisk created during the reign of Ramesses II. It was commissioned for the Luxor Temple and is covered in hieroglyphics, yet it has lived in Paris for about 200 years. The Ottoman Egyptians sent the Egyptian relic to France, and it has been on display on Place de Concorde since 1836.
Both locals and visitors, like Egyptologist Jean-Guillaume Olette-Pelletier, admire it there. Skilled in deciphering hieroglyphics, he would take walks about the neighbourhood and examine the obelisk. The majority of the text was conventional and pointed to the enormous building's location near the Luxor Temple's portico, but Olette-Pelletier saw something out of the ordinary as well.
An extremely interesting detail caught his attention: several crypto-hieroglyphs were woven into the surface. One type of writing that incorporates wordplay and puzzles is called crypto-hieroglyphs. This type of writing was intended for the intellectual elite and was initially identified by Canon Étienne Drioton in the 1950s. Fortunately for Olette-Pelletier, this specialised writing is only accessible to a select few researchers. Curiously, when he started searching for evidence to support his observations, he was unable to locate any studies. He therefore began his own research.
His initial sightings were done with binoculars, but to get confirmation, Olette-Pelletier would need to get up close. Restoration work in the run-up to the 2024 Olympics in Paris gave him his chance in 2021. He was the first academic to study the obelisk up close in more than a century after securing authorisation to climb on the scaffolding. His first observations were validated by what he observed: the obelisk's surface was certainly intertwined with crypto-hieroglyphs. Ultimately, he managed to count seven.
Later this year, he will publish his complete discovery of the crypto-hieroglyphs in ENiM, but he recently shared some of his findings with Artnet. One of the markings, according to Olette-Pelletier, aims to establish Ramesses as a leader by connecting his lineage to the gods. Elite nobles who came by boat to attend the yearly Opet festival would have been able to see the symbols at the top of the obelisk. The pharaoh turned the obelisk into a potent propaganda tool by adding these messages.
“The use of hieroglyphic cryptography allows us to provide a new reading of pharaonic texts,” shares Olette-Pelletier. “It’s an example proving that Egyptology still holds a lot of things waiting to be discovered.”