Hell of a guy

The breakthrough came in 2021, when scaffolding covered the obelisk for restoration ahead of the Olympic Games. With special permission, Olette-Pelletier climbed the scaffolding to examine the upper parts—usually inaccessible to researchers. The close inspection confirmed that the monument carries a total of seven crypto-hieroglyphs—a rare form of encoded text discovered in the 1950s by Canon Étienne Drioton. These cryptic inscriptions, which typically feature puns, visual wordplay, and varying directions of reading, were meant only to be understood by Egypt’s intellectual elite.

These secret messages, according to Olette-Pelletier, would have been legible to nobles arriving by boat on the Nile, especially to those attending an annual Opet Festival honoring the god Amun. The side of the obelisk that once faced the river (now the Seine) was built so carefully that only from specific angles were the inscriptions readable—including one that even needed to be viewed from a 45-degree angle.