Luxor Obelisk

The Luxor Obelisk is a 23.5-metre granite monolith from the 13th century BC standing at the centre of the Place de la Concorde in Paris. Pharaoh Ramses II raised it as one of a pair in front of the entrance to Luxor Temple in Thebes; its twin remains there. In 1830 Egypt's viceroy Muhammad Ali Pasha gave the obelisk to France. A purpose-built vessel, the Luxor, ferried it to Paris in 1833, where engineer Apollinaire Lebas re-erected it in 1836 in front of 200,000 onlookers. Inscriptions on the pink granite base record the engineering of the transport. The obelisk marks the pivot of the Axe historique between the Louvre and the Arc de Triomphe and has been a classified monument historique since 1937. Visitors usually stand at the base to sight along the Champs-Elysees toward the Arc.