Two 3,300-year-old twin obelisks once marked the entrance to the Luxor Temple. Muhammad Ali Pasha, the WÄli and self-proclaimed Khedive of Egypt, offered the two obelisks to France as a gift in 1829.
In August 1832, the French paddle ship
Sphinx sailed to Alexandria to rendezvous there with the barge
Louqsor, which was to load the Luxor Obelisk and bring it to Paris.
Sphinx then towed
Louqsor back to France. The ships departed on 1 April 1833 and reached Toulon on 10 May. The ships arrived at Cherbourg on 12 August 1833.
The first obelisk arrived in Paris on December 21, 1833. Three years later, on October 25, 1836, King Louis-Philippe of France had it placed in the center of Place de la Concorde.
The other obelisk remained on location in Egypt. In the 1990s, President François Mitterrand, as a symbolic gesture, officially renounced any French claim to the second obelisk.
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