During renovation work in 2021, Jean-Guillaume Olette-Pelletier, an Egyptologist at the University of Paris-Sorbonne and the Catholic Institute of Paris, became the first specialist to access the top of the obelisk since its installation at Place de la Concorde in 1836. Using his binoculars and a notebook, he discovered a hidden message at the top of the obelisk and identified "seven cryptographies," according to France Info.
Olette-Pelletier noted oddities and incongruities in the hieroglyphs, which he realized could hide something other than the clumsiness or carelessness of a scribe. "That's when I realized that there were hidden signs in the scenes," he said, according to a report by 20 Minutes. Some of these oddities were already noticed before but were considered errors or typos.
During the global lockdown in 2020, Olette-Pelletier went every day in front of the Luxor Obelisk to "reproduce all the drawings" and began reading the hieroglyphs inscribed on its facade during his daily hour of outdoor exercise. He is one of only six people in the world capable of reading the cryptohieroglyphs, according to BFMTV.
One of the hidden messages included a hieroglyph concealed in one of the crowns of Ramses II: "horns of a bull." Upon examining the entire scene, Olette-Pelletier understood that there were other hidden hieroglyphs that create a formula: "Appease the life force of the god Amon." "And then I understood," he stated, according to France Info.
He explained that this message was only visible to those who entered the temple dedicated to the god Amon, at the entrance of which the obelisk stood during ancient Egypt. "With this angle of view, the nobility saw the hidden message and said to themselves: 'The king confirms himself as the incarnate god, who cannot be dethroned.' It was propaganda aimed at the very high intellectual elite," Olette-Pelletier said, according to France Info.
The messages discovered and translated by Olette-Pelletier form "propaganda" and "a communication war" to establish the power of Ramses II. The hidden messages, when combined, have a new meaning. "The understanding of the hidden text can only be grasped if you walk around the monument," he explained.
This phenomenon is called "three-dimensional cryptography," according to BFMTV. On each face of the obelisk, the mention and representation of a small set of hieroglyphs, once assembled, give the name of Ramses II. "You have to be at an angle greater than 45 degrees to see the scene; it simply allowed to say that here, it is indeed Ramses II who rules Egypt," Olette-Pelletier added.
On the opposite face of the obelisk, which originally faced the Nile, another type of message is engraved. According to Olette-Pelletier, these coded messages were intended for people coming "necessarily" from the Nile, as the monument was formerly at the entrance of the Amon temple in Luxor. The message was visible to men, but also to the god Amon himself.
"People had not noticed that under one of the drawings of the god Amon, there is an offering table. This allows us to discover a phrase where no element is missing: an offering that the king gives to the god Amon," he stated, according to an interview with BFMTV. He added that the messages affirm Ramses II is "the incarnate king, who cannot be dethroned," conveying that he was of divine essence and therefore legitimate to rule Egypt.
"This is a method of communication at least 3,000 years old," Olette-Pelletier stated, according to a report by 20 Minutes.
The article was written with the assistance of a news analysis system.