Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair! The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things, Tell that its sculptor well those passions read Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,Īnd wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command, Who said-‘Two vast and trunkless legs of stone It was the news of the statue’s arrival in London that galvanised Smith and Shelley to set pen to paper, and Shelley wrote the now famous poem ‘Ozymandias’, published in 1818:
#STATUE OF OZYMANDIAS FULL#
Once, the Younger Memnon was a full figure, 57 feet tall, with a body and legs, but now only the head remains (and in itself it weighs some seven tons). With its pair, the statue stood guard at the entrance to the Ramesseum and depicted Ramesses II. It had been excavated from the Ramesseum, the mortuary temple of Ramesses II located at Thebes, Egypt. In 1817, the British Museum in London added to its collection a granite statue known as the Younger Memnon. Known as Ramesses the Great, he was a popular pharaoh who ruled from 1279-13 BC, during the Nineteenth Dynasty.
Ozymandias, in Greek, means Ramesses, and the king in question was Ramesses II. If any want to know how great I am and where I lie, let him outdo me in my work. In 1817, the writers Horace Smith and Percy Bysshe Shelley challenged each other to write a sonnet inspired by a passage by a Greek historian about a colossal statue of Ancient Egypt:
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