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Would they ever give the thing back though?
You can change the link: https://news.artnet.com/art-world/hidden-messages-paris-luxo...
The news article was a true click-bait. 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.
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
I've seen a few articles on this now. They keep calling it a "secret" message and "hieroglyphic cryptography," but then talk about how sufficiently literate people are supposed to understand it, and the content is along the lines of "The god-king cannot be dethroned" and "Make offerings to the gods." Nothing about this sounds like it was intended to be kept secret or confidential from anyone. This seems more like fan…
Crypto-hieroglyphic writing is a real thing: https://www.britannica.com/topic/hieroglyphic-writing/Crypto... 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 example…
Would they ever give the thing back though?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It was a gift from Egypt https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luxor_Obelisks
Egypt was subjugated to the Ottoman Empire at the time. And even if they had some kind of king/dictator, it is certainly was a decision of a free people. What antique France monuments did France give away just like that for no reason? Do not take what should not have been offered.
It may stretch the definition of "antique" but does the Statue of Liberty count? Nations give other nations things all the time, and when power changes hands that doesn't negate those gifts of the spirit in which they were offered.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
...they weren't?
They were, Egypt was conquered at the time. The empires pillaged it and gifted it among themselves.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
While I generally understand the sentiment, I would also argue that most of the countries that have been pillaged of artifacts are also incredibly unstable. I would rather the pillaging exist than to lose history. We could go on as to why those countries are unstable but keeping it bounded to simply the pillaging of artifacts I stand behind it.
Europeans routinely destroyed the artifacts of any culture they considered heretical. They tore down Greek and Roman temples to build churches on the ruins. They stripped the Coliseum for parts. They made soup out of mummies and traded grave goods as baubles. The premise that they somehow deserve to be considered the librarians and guardians of the very cultures they colonized and exploited is an absurd, and implicit…
