Egyptologist uncovers hidden messages on Paris’s iconic obelisk
news.artnet.com
news.artnet.com
Fun facts, prophet Moses is the most mentioned prophet in the Quran even more than Muhammad. The main protagonist during Moses time is Pharaoh and his fake claim of divinity is recorded verbatim in the Quran [1].
Pharaoh declared, “O chiefs! I know of no other god for you but myself. So bake bricks out of clay for me, O Hamân, and build a high tower so I may look at the God of Moses, although I am sure he is a liar.”
[1] Quran Surah Al-Qasas (The Story): Ayat 38:
What the Quran says about Jesus and about Mary is also interesting.
This seems more like fancy typesetting than cryptography, combined with an awareness that the writing at the top of a big tall obelisk will only be readable from a distance.
Such writing would give non-standard meanings to signs, or drawn them in non-standard ways, or use entirely invented signs. It would be a puzzle to work out the meaning, and I imagine most people who weren't very literate would be stumped. They certainly stumped egyptologists for a while when the first examples were discovered.
In this article in French, they mention hieroglyphs encoded in the way arms and legs are drawn of a figure on the throne of Tutankhamun, and that only 6 Egyptologists in the whole worlds are able to decode them.
Hmmm, I wonder how mainstream these ideas are? Do other Egyptologists respect them?
Still, it's clear ancient egyptians loved their puzzles, the clear interpretation of what they mean is what elude us.
Not that it matters. Just a bit of trivia. The only thing you need to know is that he's a gazillion times better than Kerouac, who did write books and shouldn't have.
I don't wonder. You can look up egyptian texts with translations and pronunciation guides. We have literally hundreds of thousands of discarded papyri and plenty of papers detailing the archaeological processes of their excavations and interpretations. It's a gold-mine of explicit documentation about their practices and beliefs and logistics over millennia. We know about their diets, their genetics, how their ruling class changed over time, how they interpreted life and death, to the extent where we can draw likely religious transmission among stories with other near-east religions. The extent of evidence we have demonstrating actual knowledge is better than anything else in the ancient world.
Granted, interpretation isn't science, but it's still expected to be presented rationally. The linguistics that yielded the translation itself proved empirically very reliable.
There are many cranks into Egyptian history with many different agendas, though, and I'm sure many of them call themselves egyptologists.
It would be nice if someone created a video similar to the "distance ladder" video but for hieroglyphs. Beyond Champollion and into the progress to now. That would be fascinating. It may exist already.
Yet it also mentions why the obelisk is in Paris: a gift from the, Muslim, Ottoman, ruler of Egypt to France.
You want to talk about the crypto, not why the pointy stick is in Paris. Then we're in agreement
As for the latter, there's a statue of "Ramesses II (Dyn XIX) as a Child"[1] which shows Horus as a falcon with the sun (rꜥ) on his breast, a child (ms) beneath it, in his hand a sedge plant (sw). Naming the parts—sun, child, sedge—in this order gives rꜥmssw, vocalized raꜥmissaw, roughly maybe approximately [raʕ'missaw], in any event the very name of Ramesses, meaning "He is / was born / brought forth by Ra / the Sun". Note that you'll have to choose to omit ḥr "Horus" although the falcon dominates the sculpture, and that the sedge does not represent a plant but, by virtue of sounding like it, the 3rd person suffix sw "he", so there's some guesswork involved. All said, it's a fine example of a "rebus".
Neither rebus reading nor pictorial description are commonly classified as cryptographic orthography in Egyptology.
The statue demonstrates nicely how acutely aware of their language, their artistic traditions and their writing Egyptian artists were. When we look at the depiction of Pharaoh and Amun on the obelisk as explained by Olette-Pelletier, however, we hardly see any of this. Yes, an arm with an offering on the palm of the hand was often used to write dy "to give", but usually those offerings are triangular bread loaves, not round nw vessels. Yes, the hieroglyph for "ḥtp" looks like a flat rectangle but, again, with a bread offering on it which is missing from the flat rectangle that pharaoh is kneeling on.
I really wonder what the fuzz is about; clearly it's a picture of the king giving offering to the god, and all he does is read out the picture. This is something that you can do with a lot of Egyptian art: there's the king, you know him by the distinctive crown, and there's Amun, which you know again by his distinctive headdress sporting two long feathers. The king is kneeling because he's offering, and he has his arms stretched out presenting stuff because he's, well, giving. The king is giving things to the god. What part of that was not known before, what part of that is cryptographic?
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Ramesses_II_as_child.jpg
That said I'm no Egyptologist myself as seemingly the journalists aren't, either, but as for me I'm itching to write a scathing takedown of this affair. I'm open to discovering that maybe the originator of the theory was misunderstood by the media, maybe his wording was not clear enough. I guess what I want to say is when you want clicks there's more than one way to do it; my way would roughly be (1) criticize use of the term 'cryptography' when all they do is tell me what they see in the picture: king giving offerings to god; king's sitting on a mat(?), god's standing on a plinth (as is customary); (2) criticize the very specific interpretation they give for this particular depiction when we find this same motive all over the place, all of the time; (3) criticize the claim that only nobles travelling by boat would have been able to see and understand the message when in Ancient Egypt taking a boat to cross the river as well as, as a local of Thebes, taking part in festivities must both have been very commonplace for old and young, rich and poor alike; also, artists in general and, for example, the foremen of worker gangs working on Khufu's pyramid were very well able to use writing and depictions to express themselves.
The messages were not secret at all, they were just written on the face of the obelisk that faces the river. Meaning that only visitors by boat would read them when docking rather than the poor pedestrians using the normal road.
It's a little strange to have so little morals you accept a stolen gift from conquerors and don't make the slightest effort to return it over a considerable period of time, even after doing such a thing becomes the accepted moral thing to do...and then suddenly develop a conscience and set of morals so particular that "who is running the country" means you can't return it.
It's almost like it's a very thin excuse and not a legitimate reason.
It doesn't belong to France, and it's not France's place to decide that they don't like the particular guy running things at that moment and thus refuse to return it.
Really, Europe just has a massive problem refusing to acknowledge any of the brutally oppressive colonialism it was responsible for across centuries...
That political entity no longer exists, and the people of Egypt would likely never have willingly parted with the many obelisks and other historical artifacts that have left their shores.
1. You need to draw the line somewhere. It is simply not possible (nor even desirable) to redress all historical wrongs. It seems reasonable to not attempt to redress wrongs which are out of living memory for anyone involved.
2. As others pointed out, the people currently living in Egypt is not the same people who lived there when these things were built anyway, and there was a hell of a lot of conquest to get from there to here. This is not a case where the Ottomans stole it from the original owners. That makes this not a very good candidate for giving it back.