How did the Luxor Obelisk get to Paris?

Muhammad Ali, the ruler of Egypt, offered France the pair of obelisks outside Luxor Temple in 1830. Only one ever left. Lowering it, floating it down the Nile, towing it across the Mediterranean and hauling it up the Seine took more than two years. Raising it took a single autumn morning, in front of a crowd usually put at 200,000.

A ship built around a stone

The obelisk was carved for the pharaoh Ramesses II more than 3,000 years ago. It is one piece of pink granite, 23 metres (75 feet) tall, about as high as a seven-storey building, and it weighs about 230 tonnes. Jean-François Champollion, the scholar who had just deciphered hieroglyphs, urged France to take the Luxor pair.

The French navy built a flat-bottomed ship for the job and named it the Luxor. It left Toulon in April 1831 and reached Luxor that summer. The engineer Apollinaire Lebas and the ship's crew spent months lowering the obelisk onto its side. To get it aboard, they sawed off the ship's bow and slid the stone in through the front.

Then they waited for the Nile to rise high enough to float a ship this heavy. The Luxor finally left in August 1832.

Two years on the water

From Alexandria, a steam paddle ship called the Sphinx towed the Luxor across the Mediterranean and round Spain. They reached Cherbourg in August 1833. At Rouen the Luxor lost its masts so it could pass under the Seine's bridges, and it reached Paris in December 1833.

Champollion never saw it arrive. He died in 1832, while the obelisk was still in Egypt. In Paris it lay on its side by the river for almost three years.

The morning it went up

King Louis-Philippe put it at the centre of Place de la Concorde. In 1793 this square had held the guillotine that killed Louis XVI. The reason usually given for the choice is that a pharaoh's monument took no side in French quarrels.

On 25 October 1836, about 350 artillerymen hauled on capstans while Lebas's rig of timber and rope swung the obelisk upright. It took about three and a half hours. The story goes that Lebas stood underneath it the whole time, so that he would not live to see it fall.

Louis-Philippe had survived an assassination attempt that June, and he did not want to be seen next to a failure. He watched from a window of the Hôtel de la Marine, the colonnaded building on the north side of the square. Once the obelisk stood, he stepped out onto the balcony to a long ovation.

Where to stand

Walk to the pink granite obelisk at the centre of Place de la Concorde. Look at the sides of its granite pedestal. In 1839 gilded diagrams were added there, showing the ramps, ropes and capstans that lowered the obelisk at Luxor and raised it here.

The gold cap on top is much newer. The original cap had been lost in ancient times, and France added this gilded one in 1998.

Hear it where it happened

The Trevlo walk along the Champs-Élysées tells this story at its last stop, the Luxor Obelisk. It starts under the Arc de Triomphe, then follows the avenue down past the Rond-Point and the Grand Palais to Place de la Concorde. Six stops, about thirty-three minutes of listening, at your own pace.

The first stop is free to play on this page, and your first tour in the app is free.