"Ozymandias"

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."

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 shatter'd visage lies, whose frown And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command Tell that its sculptor well those passions read Which yet survive, stamp'd on these lifeless things, The hand that mock'd 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.

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.

In Egypt's sandy silence, all alone,
Stands a gigantic Leg, which far off throws The only shadow that the Desart knows: - "I am great OZYMANDIAS," saith the stone, "The King of Kings; this mighty City shows "The wonders of my hand." - The City's gone, - Nought but the Leg remaining to disclose The site of this forgotten Babylon. We wonder,- and some Hunter may express Wonder like ours, when thro' the wilderness Where London stood, holding the Wolf in chace, He meets some fragment huge, and stops to guess What powerful but unrecorded race Once dwelt in that annihilated place.

In 1893-1894 I went to to search for remains of the dynastic race, which presumably had entered Egypt at that point from the Red Sea. In the lowest part of the temple foundations we found parts of three colossal figures of the local god , each with surface carvings of animals, &c. They obviously belonged to a far earlier art than anything known in Egypt, and all later discoveries confirm their being placed as the earliest works of the , long before the establishment of the . One figure is at Cairo, and two are in the Asmolean Museum at Oxford.

At Susa, the ancient , named 'Shushan the Palace' in the Book of Daniel, situated in Persia, once the ancient capital of Elam, the excavators, working under the direction of for the , found three large pieces of black , which when fitted together formed a monolith , about 2.25 metres high, tapering upwards from 1.9 to 1.65 metres. The stone itself is in the in Paris, but a beautiful reproduction of it stands in the Babylonian Room of the .
At the top of the stela is engraved in low bas-relief a representation of Hammurabi himself receiving his laws from a seated god, usually taken to be the sun-god , who was regarded in Babylonia as the supreme judge of gods and men, whose children or attendants were and or Rectitude and Right.

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.

It was adorned with many fine temples and monuments; among others, with a pillar cut out of one stone, twenty four yards high, at the top of which stood the image of Garuda, half-man and half-eagle.

Fancy a nicely proportioned monument, eight or ten feet high, hewn from one stone, standing in a pleasure ground; magnify it to a height of fifteen hundred feet, retaining its simplicity of form and fineness, and cover its surface with crystals; then you may gain an idea of the sublimity and beauty of this ice-burnished dome, one of many adorning this wonderful park.

Sultam Mahmud, having entered into the idol temple, beheld an excessively long and broad room, in so much that fifty-six pillars had been made to support the roof. Somnat was an idol cut out of stone, whose height was five yards, of which three yards were visible, and two yards were concealed in the ground. Yaminu-d daula having broken that idol with his own hand, ordered that they should pack up pieces of the stone, take them to Ghaznin, and throw them on the threshold of the Jama Masjid.

[W]e discover that for Cheops, for the builder of the most impressive monument of antiquity, its actual name is Knum Kufu: may the god Khnum protect Cheops. ...The pyramids must have been done within the technology associated with Khnum, which is agglomeration.

My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!

Sesostris was the only Egyptian king who also ruled Ethiopia. To commemorate his name, he set before the temple of Hephaestus two stone statues of himself and his wife, each thirty cubits high, and statues of his four sons, each of twenty cubits. Long afterwards Darius the Persian would have set up his statue before these; but the priest of Hephaestus forbade him, saying that he had achieved nothing equal to the deeds of Sesostris the Egyptian; for Sesostris (he said) had subdued the Scythians, besides as many other nations as Darius had conquered, and Darius had not been able to overcome the Scythians; therefore it was not just that Darius should set his statue before the statues of Sesostris, whose achievements he had not equalled. Darius, it is said, let the priest have his way.

One sees a kind of procession of Egyptian priests, whose heads are shaven and crowned with leaves; they wear the dress of the land. Some carry cymbals, flutes and trumpets, others bear sticks adorned with carved hawk's heads. Some stand under a portico, others take their way to the Temple of Serapis. These last bring hither a casket, holding the god's bones. Behind a priestess, clothed in yellow, is seen a kind of building, made for the bird ibis, represented on its walls. In this picture is a tower whose top is concave, and there is also a vase to receive dew. This scene is not a caprice of the imagination. All has been taken from that famous Temple of Fortuna at Palestrina, whose pavement, composed of beautiful mosaics, depicts in a true and good manner the history of Egypt and Ethiopia. I have put all these things into my picture, in order by their novelty and variety to please you, and also to show that the Virgin is really in Egypt.