Secret Messages of Pharaoh Ramesses II Discovered on the Obelisk in Paris’s Place de la Concorde

French Egyptologist Jean-Guillaume Olette-Pelletier, a professor at the University of Paris-Sorbonne and the Catholic Institute of Paris, has discovered a series of hidden inscriptions on the obelisk in Place de la Concorde. These texts, previously unnoticed, reveal new information about the reign of Ramesses II, the pharaoh who commissioned this monument at the entrance to the temple of Luxor in the 13th century BCE.

Olette-Pelletier has become the first Egyptologist since Champollion to climb to the top of the obelisk, a feat that allowed him to decipher encrypted messages within its hieroglyphs. The monument, a gift from the viceroy of Egypt Mehmet Ali to France in 1828 during the reign of Louis Philippe, has kept its secrets for nearly two centuries.

The story behind this discovery reads like an adventure novel. In 2020, during the pandemic lockdown, Olette-Pelletier, a specialist in hieroglyphic cryptography, used his daily walks to study the only Egyptian relic within a one-kilometer radius: the Luxor Obelisk, located in the heart of Paris.

obelisk paris secret messages — Detail of the Luxor obelisk in the Place de la Concorde in Paris. Credit: Mariordo Mario Roberto Duran Ortiz / Wikimedia Commons

I was living in the 8th district at the time, so I would walk to the obelisk and read the hieroglyphs to relax, recalls the epigraphist. At one point, I noticed something unusual: the direction of the hieroglyphs pointed toward the entrance of the Luxor temple’s portico. But that was only the beginning.

Intrigued, Olette-Pelletier researched the academic literature and found that no one had previously documented these differences. Armed with his work tools, including a pair of binoculars, he returned to the obelisk and confirmed his suspicion: the monument contained multiple hieroglyphic cryptography, meaning hidden messages within the hieroglyphs themselves.

Only six Egyptologists in the world are capable of reading these crypto-hieroglyphs, a form of secret writing discovered in the 1950s by Canon Étienne Drioton. While some Egyptians could read hieroglyphs, only an elite understood the hidden messages, considered the language of the gods, explains Olette-Pelletier.

In 2022, the researcher published an article in the Bulletin de l’Institut français d’archéologie orientale (BIFAO) about a “crypto-text” on the throne of the boy-king Tutankhamun, demonstrating that certain messages are read in three dimensions. When the young king sat on the throne, his body completed a hidden phrase: his arms and legs became hieroglyphs, he details.

To confirm his theory about the obelisk, Olette-Pelletier needed to study the inscriptions at the top, 30 meters high. The opportunity came in 2021, when the Regional Directorate of Cultural Affairs (DRAC) installed scaffolding to restore the monument ahead of the 2024 Olympic Games. After obtaining permission, the Egyptologist climbed up and spent days gathering data.

His findings shed light on the early years of Ramesses II, a pharaoh who sought to legitimize his reign. Born before his father, Seti I, ascended the throne, Ramesses could not claim a direct divine origin. In his second year as pharaoh, he changed his name from Usermaatra (“the powerful and just one of Ra”) to Setepenra (“chosen of Ra”), thus linking himself to the sun god.

This modification is engraved on the obelisk, which allows us to date its carving in two phases: one before year 2 of his reign and another afterward, explains Olette-Pelletier.

The researcher identified seven levels of cryptography on the obelisk. One of the most striking appears on the upper face, originally oriented toward the Nile. It was only visible from a 45-degree angle, probably to the nobles arriving by boat during the Opet festival, he explains. On that face, Ramesses appears with the pschent, the crown symbolizing the union of Upper and Lower Egypt—a clear message of his absolute power.

Moreover, by combining hieroglyphs from different faces, ritual phrases are formed. For example, on the east face (toward the desert in Luxor, now facing north in Paris), bull horns hidden in Ramesses’s crown form the word ka (“vital force”). Along with other symbols, the secret inscription reads: “Appease the ka-force of Amun,” a reminder of the need for offerings to pacify the gods.

These findings remind us that, for the Egyptians, text and image were one and the same, concludes Olette-Pelletier, whose discoveries will soon be published in the journal ENIM.