Talk:Luxor Obelisks

Images of Alain Robert climbing the Luxor obelisk in 2000 shows him standing on top, without the new pyramidian. However, the pyramidian was apparently added in 1998. Can anyone resolve this as I am confused. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 81.178.22.82 (talk) 14:06, 23 July 2010 (UTC)

It seems that Robert climbed the obelisk in 1998 and 2000 according to his website.

Hi, this is my first ever contribution to Wikipedia so sorry if this messes up. In any case, I've noted some issues with the citations for the draping of the Obelisk with the pink condom: one possible source to use is perhaps this one. I'm not sure how to add it into the article though and I'm worried of making errors. Thank you! --BritishRoyalPatriot 17:30, 2 January 2015 (UTC) — Preceding unsigned comment added by BritishRoyalPatriot (talk • contribs)

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Legality of the obelisk
An anonymous editor changed the lead section to say the obelisk in Paris was "stolen". When I reverted that edit, on the grounds that the king of Egypt at the time gave the obelisk to France as a gift, the anonymous editor said instead that the obelisk "still remains in Paris despite France having no legal right to it since 1981".

It's true that Egypt passed a law in 1983 declaring all antiquities to be state property, but according to this article it wasn't considered to apply retroactively until this year, when the Egyptian government began arguing that antiquities that were legally removed from the country before 1983 still counted as Egyptian property: https://coinsweekly.com/is-egypt-breaking-its-own-laws/#:~:text=Reinterpreting%20an%20Old%20Law&text=Rihan%20justifies%20this%20view%20with,that%20exporting%20them%20is%20illegal. Laws don't normally work that way, so if Egypt does try to apply those claims universally, it will prove very contentious. The article mentions the obelisk as an example of what the Egyptian government could demand if this reinterpretation of the law we applied across the board, but as far as I can tell, they haven't actually asked for it as yet.

I don't know to what extent this source is considered reliable in Wikipedia terms, and I don't have time at the moment to search for other sources. But the upshot seems to be that this is a contentious legal argument that Egypt has only recently started to make, and we don't yet know to what extent they will pursue it in the future. So we can't say outright that France's possession of the obelisk is illegal, at least not yet. I'm undoing the anonymous editor's new edit, although with a caveat that this issue could become worthy of coverage in the future, though not necessarily on this page; I'd say it's only relevant here if Egypt applies its claim to the obelisk. A. Parrot (talk) 19:49, 11 November 2022 (UTC)