Ozymandias Lives!
Everyone knows who “Ozymandias” is. Even if you don’t know you know.
For one, you’ve seen this guy:
And this guy:
There are thousands of these familiar iconic images from antiquity. But for 20th century cineastes, there’s also this guy:
Ozymandias is the Ancient Greek name for Ramesses II (or Ramses the Great), the Egyptian pharaoh who still lords over the modern imagination four and a half millenia after his reign. A child-pharaoh who assumed the throne in the year 1279 BCE at the age of 14, Ramesses II ruled for the next 66 years with such overpowering military and political success that he enshrined his own name and visage in countless temples, monuments, carvings, cartouches, and ultimately a grand mortuary.
Enshrined but not immortalized. Despite the pharaoh’s devoutest belief, all these artifacts would lay for centuries in various timeworn states of ruin in situ or, since the 19th century, would be displayed piecemeal in museums, reduced to glossy coffee-table books, or sequestered for private viewing in the collections of modern-day moguls.
But oh! what glorious ruins!
In our own era, many modern biblical scholars have posited that Ramesses II is the pharaoh of the Book of Exodus, a biblical role that is more enduring than his colossal monuments, and far more iniquitous. This secured him the inside lane to Hollywood and Cecile B. deMille’s magnificent Oscar-winning movie “The Ten Commandments” where he was majestically portrayed by Yul Brynner (pictured above, not below).
Ozymandias was resurrected on 21st century TV in the series “Breaking Bad” whose highly acclaimed and award-winning 60th episode — the one in which Walter White’s meth empire is crumbling — was entitled “Ozymandias.” And again in Alan Moore’s graphic novel “Watchmen” whose superhero is named Ozymandias.
Fascinated as the world is with Ramses II, the name “Ozymandias” would have disappeared but for Percy Bysshe Shelley, the English Romantic poet who wrote a poem in 1818 about a traveler who speaks to the poem’s narrator about the colossal ruins of antiquity he found in the faraway desert sands. Here is the poem:
Ozymandias
I met a traveler 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.
No poet will ever outdo this sonnet’s 14 lines in describing and mocking the arrogance of powerful rulers who believe their mighty works will outlast Time.
Ironically, Shelley’s poem is itself a mighty work that has achieved its own kind of immortality. Regarded by many as his greatest poem, it lives and thrives in countless anthologies, websites, and AP English high school curricula. While Pharaoh Ozymandias’s “gilded monuments” were eventually (and predictably) “besmeared by sluttish time,” Shelley’s sonnet “in black ink” reinvigorated the pharaoh for the last two centuries and surely a few centuries more.
There is splendid irony here.
The Brevity of Immortality
When Shelley sat down to write “Ozymandias” in 1818, Ramesses/ Ozymandias had been buried in name and in monument by time, wind, and sand. Before 1798, Egypt’s ancient monuments were monumentally neglected, eroded by the elements, stripped for parts (i.e., stone) by Roman, Byzantine, and early Islamic rulers and authorities in Egypt, and vandalized by treasure hunters. Europe’s own interest in and knowledge of Egyptian antiquities were minimal and sporadic before Napoleon’s campaign of 1798–1801 in the Ottoman territories of Egypt and Syria.
That campaign had two purposes: military and scientific. The former ultimately ended in retreat, but the latter had repercussions far beyond Napoleon’s colonial purposes. From the outset, the French expedition included scholars, scientists, engineers, and artists whose varied works cleared the way for a systematic and scholarly study of Egyptian antiquity.
The Rosetta Stone with its trilingual inscriptions was discovered by a French engineer in 1799, soon opening up access to a modern understanding of ancient Egyptian literature and inscriptions. A series of publications collectively known as the “Description de l’Égypte” published between 1809 and 1829 had a more immediate impact. These papers sparked a wave of European public interest in ancient Egypt and laid the groundwork for modern Egyptology studies.
There is a cosmic irony here: Napoleon intended to bring France to Egypt but instead he brought Egypt to France and the world. His expansionist ambitions were thwarted, and rather than planting European Enlightenment values on Egyptian soil, his campaign unleashed a European fascination with Egyptian history.
But that historical irony is not what interests me. I prefer the irony that is baked into the fate of Shelley’s poem. When Shelley sat down in December 1817 to “immortalize” in verse the ephemerality of grandiose monuments to power, he could not have foreseen that the long-buried pharaoh had a bright future and a new claim on immortality awaiting.
The emergence of the scientific fields of archaeology and, more specifically, Egyptology stimulated by the Napoleonic campaign, not to mention rising public interest in global travel and tourism, guaranteed Ozymandias would rise like the Phoenix.
As Shelley penned his poem, the head-and-torso fragments of Ozymandias’s statue were en route to the British Museum, where they have resided ever since. Unlike John Keats who found direct inspiration in the British Museum for his poem about a Grecian urn, Shelley did not see the pharaonic artifacts, although he may well have heard news of their excavation.
The traveler in Shelley’s poem speaks of “the colossal Wreck” amidst the endless stretch of sands. He describes a desolate scene in which Time has ravaged the grandness of an empire — a theme consonant with Shelley’s radical politics and disdain for authority. But those statuary fragments shipping toward London were the beginning of a grand dusting-off of ancient history and re-memorialization of the ancient Pharaoh’s grandeur.
As Shelley wrote of the futility of ambition for everlasting glory, Ozymandias’s name and story was about to be resurrected by history for a new stint of immortal fame. The empire was long gone, but the lost monuments to the empire’s grandeur and power were rising up out of the sand. What a grand irony that Shelley contributed mightily to Ozymandias’s new immortality by creating one of the English language’s most lasting and widely-read poems about the futility of that ambition.
It is an irony exceeded only by the fact that, in mocking immortality made of deathless stone, Shelley wrote an immortal poem made of deathless words and now itself centuries old.
But immortality is the same for pharaohs and poets. It only means “for the time being.”
King of Kings and Dormouse of Dormice
There is a second sublime irony here, or actually several. Shelley did not write “Ozymandias” for “the eyes of all posterity.” He did not have Ozymandian ambitions for his poem. He wrote it essentially for amusement in a friendly sonnet-writing competition with a compatriot, Horace Smith, while the two were vacationing over Christmas along with Shelley’s wife, Mary Shelley. (Mary Shelley’s own status as a literary immortal arises, in significant part, from her novel “Frankenstein” which, like Shelley’s immortal poem was written in a friendly competition with Shelley and other literati.)
Horace Smith was a wealthy banker, a minor poet, and a writer of long forgotten historical novels. He was, apparently, a decent and generous man who helped Shelley with his personal finances. One or both of them had access to the extant volumes of the ancient Greek historian Diodorus of Sicily, and it is Diodorus who handed them the idea across 19 centuries to write a sonnet about the Egyptian pharaoh’s ridiculously enormous statue.
Diodorus made his own bid for immortality by writing a colossal history of the world in 40 volumes. Most of his work is lost to time, but the volume about Ozymandias’s era was one of 15 to survive. Since Diodorus lived and wrote in the 1st century BCE, Ozymandias’s gargantuan monuments to himself would have been about 1,200 years old but Diodorus does not comment on their condition at that time.
But Diodorus does provide a hearty description of the statue’s grandeur and immensity, and importantly he provides the behemoth’s inscription: “I am Ozymandias, king of kings: If anyone would know how great I am and where I lie, let him surpass any of my works.” This, apparently, got Smith and his dear friend Shelley going.
Though Smith is not much remembered by history, his role in the poetic joust has assured him a little piece of immortality, right next to Ramesses II, Diodorus, and his good friend Shelley.
In case it isn’t clear, it is his role in the competition, and not his contribution to it, that gets him a page in the history books. Here is what he parried with:
In Egypt’s sandy silence, all alone,
Stands a gigantic Leg, which far off throws
The only shadow that the Desert knows: —
“I am great OZYMANDIAS,” saith the stone,
“The King of Kings; this mighty City show
The wonders of my hand.” — The City’s gone, —
Naught 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.
The “gigantic Leg” and the Hunter who “stops to guess” at its meaning are proof enough that one should not compete with the likes of Percy Shelley at versifying.
Both poets submitted their poems to a London weekly newspaper published by a friend. In a final ironic twist, they submitted their works under pseudonyms, and that is how the poems were first published. (They later re-published elsewhere under their names.)
The Grandness of Irony
This is how one of the world’s finest sonnets, beloved and now anthologized for more than two centuries, first came in being. It was attributed to one “Glirastes,” a pseudonym and a portmanteau of Greek and Latin meaning “lover of dormice.”
Why? Because “dormouse” was Percy Shelley’s nickname for his wife Mary Shelley.
And thus did the great Ozymandias, king of kings who pronounced praise of his own name and built his own monuments for the ages, begin his journey back to life after a few millennia of obscurity and ravagement that he never in a million years would have believed. He got a helping hand from the lover of a dormouse.
