Pharaonic Cryptographies

If the Seine, which runs through Paris, is the modest little sister of the majestic Nile that crosses Egypt from south to north, and an emblem of the French capital, several monuments rising towards the sky have become icons of the City of Lights: the Cathedral of Notre-Dame, the Eiffel Tower and the Obelisk of Concorde.

An emblematic monument of the Parisian landscape, the Obelisk of Concorde remains an exceptional witness to Egyptian art of the New Kingdom. This volume offers a novel and unprecedented analysis of its inscriptions, placed back in their original context - that of the temple of Amun at Luxor. Thanks to exceptional access to the summit of the monument, a series of previously unsuspected cryptographic devices came to light: writing games, hieroglyphic rebuses, cryptic iconographies, and three-dimensional readings.

The study demonstrates that these inscriptions are not a simple dedicatory formula, but part of a complex strategy of dynastic legitimation at the beginning of the reign of Ramesses II. The Obelisk of Concorde thus appears as a genuine support for royal propaganda, and therefore as a sacred monument.

This work, combining art history, epigraphy, and philology, fits within recent research on enigmatic scripts and their multiple functions in ancient Egypt, and substantially renews our understanding of this Ramesside monument. By extension, this book serves as a true guide to decoding pharaonic monuments as a whole, offering a fresh reading of both already known artifacts and those still to be discovered.

OLETTE-PELLETIER, Jean-Guillaume,
Pharaonic cryptographies. New reading of the Obelisk of Concorde,
CENiM 46, Montpellier, 2025.

The full study is published in CENiM n°46 .