Encrypted hieroglyphics engraved on 3,300-year-old Egyptian obelisk are finally explained | indy100

Ancient tomb of Egyptian prince unearthed in Saqqara

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Sacred carvings etched into a 3,300-year-old Egyptian obelisk may finally have been deciphered, thanks to the work of French Egyptologist Jean-Guillaume Olette-Pelletier.

The monument, which once stood at the Luxor Temple, was given to France by the Sultan of the Ottoman Empire in 1830. It now stands proudly in Paris’s Place de la Concorde.

In December 2021, Dr Olette-Pelletier was granted rare access to examine and document some of the obelisk’s highest inscriptions, located near the top.

A detailed study of the obelisk revealed the presence of seven crypto-hieroglyphs - an obscure and highly stylised script form first recognised in the mid-20th century by French scholar Canon Étienne Drioton.

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Designed with layers of linguistic tricks, such as puns, visual metaphors, and shifting reading patterns, these inscriptions were intentionally crafted to be decipherable only by the most educated members of ancient Egyptian society.

The study suggests that the inscriptions declare that Ramesses II "had been chosen by the gods, that he was of divine essence and therefore entitled to rule Egypt”.

“These messages are a form of propaganda in favour of the builder of the site, Pharaoh Ramses II,” Dr Olette-Pelletier explained.

“People hadn’t noticed that under 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.”

According to Dr Olette-Pelletier, his research is currently under consideration for publication in the journal Égypte Nilotique et Méditerranéenne.

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