OZYMANDIAS

Written by British Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, Ozymandias calls attention to the great Egyptian pharaoh, Ramses II. Published in 1818, the poem anticipated the arrival in England of a seven-ton portion of a statue of the ancient ruler, which had been acquired by the British Museum. Another ancient statue, possibly of Ramses the Great, this one twenty-four feet tall, was recently found buried in the mud beneath a Cairo slum.

Ozymandias
By Percy Bysshe Shelley

I met a traveller from an antique land,
Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

Known to the Greeks as Ozymandias, Ramses II ruled from 1279 to 1213 BCE. He is the best known and perhaps greatest of all the Egyptian pharaohs. Standing six feet tall, distinguished in warfare, he assumed the throne at the age of 26 and ruled until his death at 92. He built temples, tombs, and buildings of grand scale and astonishing artwork. His caricature celebrating the magnificence of his accomplishments has been found throughout Egypt. This recent discovery of another statue, possibly of Ramses the Great, buried in the mud of a Cairo slum gives pause again to consider the meaning of Shelley’s poem.

A German-Egyptian team led by Dr. Ayman Ashmawy and Dietrich Raue of the University of Leipzig found the massive statue and are continuing their research on it. They have been working for the past 10 years on a site in Cairo that is the location of the ancient Heliopolis, once the center of the Egyptian sun cult. Difficulties in working the site include encroaching new construction, years of debris that is more than 20 feet deep in places, and rapidly rising water levels.