Luxor Obelisk: An Ancient Egyptian Monument in Paris
Site at a Glance
- Rating
- 4.7
- Popularity
- Low
- Country
- France
- Primary era
- Bronze Age
- External website
- Open
- Eras represented
- Bronze Age, Modern
- Civilizations
- Egyptian, French
- Site type
- Civic
- Remains
- Obelisk
On this page16 sections
History
The Luxor Obelisk is an ancient Egyptian monument in Paris, France, carved during the reign of Ramesses II around 1250 BC in the Nineteenth Dynasty. Built from a single block of syenite, the tall, four-sided monument originally stood with its companion at the entrance to the Temple of Amun at Luxor. Ramesses II added the pair to a temple that was already about 150 years old, linking his reign to one of Egypt’s major religious centres.
Ramesses II and the temple entrance
The two obelisks were cut in Egypt and placed together before the temple. Their hieroglyphic inscriptions include the cartouche, an elongated frame enclosing a king’s name, of Ramesses II. They also show or describe the pharaoh presenting an offering to Amun-Ra, a major deity associated with Amun and the sun god Ra, with Horus also appearing in the translated inscriptional content. The western obelisk, on the right when facing the temple, was the shorter of the pair and later became the monument in Paris. The taller eastern obelisk remains at Luxor and leans, while the Paris monument retains an ancient fissure repaired with two stone inserts.
Plans for removal and the Egyptian gift
Interest in moving one of the obelisks to France grew during and after Napoleon’s Egyptian campaign. In 1799, General Louis-Charles-Antoine Desaix informed Napoleon about the pair. The following year, Jean-Marie-Joseph Coutelle proposed technical methods for transporting and raising one at the Place de la Concorde, but the plans were not carried out.
Muhammad Ali Pasha, the Ottoman-appointed ruler of Egypt who founded the dynasty governing the country during the nineteenth century, proposed transferring the obelisks in 1828 as a gesture of goodwill involving France and Britain. The governments abandoned the proposal because moving the monuments would have been exceptionally costly and technically difficult. In early 1830, with the approval of Baron Isidore Taylor and Jean-François Champollion, Muhammad Ali offered both obelisks to Charles X and France. He confirmed the gift again in November 1830, after the July Revolution had placed the project in doubt.
Champollion, the scholar who deciphered Egyptian hieroglyphs with the aid of the Rosetta Stone, was asked to select the first monument for removal. He chose the western obelisk because its pyramidion, the small pyramidal cap at the summit, was partly damaged but the monolith itself was intact and well preserved. Excavation showed that the eastern obelisk had a serious fracture near its base.
Transport from Luxor to Paris
Armand Florimond Mimerel designed the lowering arrangements, while Raymond de Verninac Saint-Maur commanded the purpose-built barge Luxor. The vessel left Toulon in April 1831 and reached the Nile in August. Around 300 labourers dug a canal so that the barge could approach the monument, which was loaded on 19 December 1831.
The vessel waited for the Nile flood and floated on 18 August 1832. It left Thebes on 25 August, reached Rosetta on 2 October, and departed the river mouth on 1 January 1833 after delays caused by sandbanks and winter storms. It arrived at Alexandria the next day, then left on 1 April under tow from the steam-and-sail corvette Sphinx. The convoy reached Toulon during the night of 10 to 11 May and arrived in Paris on 23 December, after sailing around Spain, stopping at Cherbourg, and continuing up the Seine from Rouen. The obelisk was first placed horizontally on the quay near the Cours-la-Reine.
Champollion died in 1832, before the operation was complete. The transfer was estimated to cost 2.5 million francs, and this expense may have helped deter the movement of the second obelisk.
Re-erection at the Place de la Concorde
Louis-Philippe I chose the centre of the Place de la Concorde for the monument. The obelisk replaced a proposed memorial to Louis XVI, whose equestrian statue by Jean-Pierre Cortot had been destroyed during the July Revolution of 1830. Placing an Egyptian monument in the square offered a politically neutral alternative at a site that might otherwise have become associated exclusively with one French faction.
Apollinaire Lebas raised the obelisk on 25 October 1836 with lifting machinery and large capstans. The operation lasted about three and a half hours, or roughly two and a quarter hours when periods of ineffective work are excluded. Louis-Philippe and the royal family watched discreetly from the Hôtel de la Marine and appeared on its balcony only after the monument stood upright. Around 200,000 people witnessed the event.
During the raising, the monolith was turned approximately 90 degrees counterclockwise from its ancient orientation. Its original eastern face consequently faces north in Paris. A ground medallion installed in 1939 commemorates the change with the words, “At the dawn of Thebes, the north rises in Paris.”
Later relations and conservation
France offered Egypt a copper clock in return for the gift in 1845. Installed at the Cairo Citadel, it was reportedly damaged during delivery and functioned poorly until its repair in 2021. On 26 September 1981, President François Mitterrand formally renounced France’s claim to the second obelisk, recognizing its ownership by Egypt.
The Luxor Obelisk became a French historic monument in 1937 and lies within the UNESCO World Heritage designation of Paris, Banks of the Seine, inscribed in 1991. A restoration begun in 2022 cleaned its varied materials with low-pressure micro-sandblasting, steam, and sponges. In 2021, Jean-Guillaume Olette-Pelletier became the first Egyptologist to reach the summit, and in 2025 he announced concealed or cryptographic hieroglyphic texts in the upper scenes and inscriptions.
Remains
The monument is a single pink syenite monolith, standing 23 metres high and weighing about 222 tonnes. Syenite is a granite-like stone containing very little quartz. It was quarried at Syene, modern Aswan, about 160 kilometres south of Luxor, where an unfinished obelisk was also found. With its pedestal, the Paris monument reaches 33.37 metres, while the pedestal itself is stated to weigh 240 tonnes.
The ancient monolith
Stone and inscriptions
All four faces carry hieroglyphs carved in sunken relief. The texts and scenes present Ramesses II making offerings to Amun-Ra and include references to Horus. François Chabas translated the inscriptions in 1868. The eastern and western faces are slightly convex, an unusual feature whose purpose remains unknown and which is reported for no other ancient obelisk.
Ancient repair
A fissure in the original stone rises to about one-third of the western face. Two dovetail-shaped stone repairs, inserted in antiquity, reinforce the damaged area. The upper part also suffered serious damage while the monolith lay for several months in a vessel’s holds on the Seine before its erection in Paris.
Pedestal and Egyptian base
Egyptian base fragment
The original Egyptian base was square and decorated with sixteen baboons standing on their hind legs with their arms raised toward the sun. A fragment of this base travelled to France with the obelisk, but it was not installed in the Place de la Concorde because its prominent depiction of genitalia was judged unsuitable for nineteenth-century public display. The fragment is preserved in the Egyptian antiquities section of the Louvre.
Parisian pedestal
The present pedestal is made from five blocks of pink granite quarried at Aber-Ildut in Brittany. Jacques Hittorff designed it during the nineteenth-century redevelopment of the Place de la Concorde. A replica at one-seventh scale was installed at the quarry’s port. Two pedestal faces show and explain the monument’s removal, journey, and re-erection. The other two carry an inscription referring to Louis-Philippe’s patronage and France’s involvement in Egypt since Napoleon I. Diagrams of the transport machinery were added in 1839, and a surrounding grille contains 323 gilded metal spikes.
Summit and sundial
Pyramidion
A 3.60-metre pyramidion crowns the monolith. The first modern cap was made from rolled bronze sheet and gilded to resemble ancient Egyptian electrum, a gold and silver alloy used in metalwork. Installed in May 1998 during the France-Egypt Year after advocacy by Christiane Desroches Noblecourt, it was intended to replace an original summit ornament said to have been taken during invasions of Egypt in the sixth century.
The 1998 pyramidion was not fully pointed and sustained progressive damage from birds. During the restoration begun in 2022, a new steel pyramidion covered with gold leaf was installed on 20 June 2023. Ateliers d’art Saint-Jacques and the Fonderie de Coubertin produced it under the authority of the French Ministry of Culture.
Horizontal sundial
The obelisk serves as the gnomon, the part of a sundial that casts the time-telling shadow, for a horizontal sundial laid across the northern part of the Place de la Concorde. Brass or metal markers and thermally bonded lines indicate hours from 7:00 to 17:00 in Roman numerals, while additional lines mark the equinoxes. The shadow gives true solar time, although its blurred edge limits precision.
Plans to turn the monument into a sundial began with the astronomer Camille Flammarion in 1913. Work connected with the 1937 Universal Exhibition was interrupted by the Second World War after it had begun. A completed design was installed in 1999 under the direction of Philippe de La Cotardière and Denis Savoie of the Société astronomique de France. The hour lines converge at a point about 29 metres south of the obelisk on its meridian. A line from that point to the summit forms an angle of about 49 degrees with the ground, corresponding approximately to Paris’s latitude and paralleling Earth’s rotational axis. A circular medallion about 10 metres north of the monument records its rotation and marks the end of its shortest noon shadow at the summer solstice on 21 June.
