Look On My Works, Ye Mighty, and Despair!

“You turned off the main desert road, and, in half an hour of bumping along a smaller trail, came to a tremendous, assertive mass of ancient grey stone. This was the palace of Darius the Great, in whose day the desert was sedulously irrigated and the city was not an oasis at all, but the concentration of a princess power and wealth. These massive columns and steps, bolder and grander than any ruin I had ever seen, were monuments to the egotism of a rich, cruel and successful empire.” Vincent Sheean, Personal History

Ozymandias

Percy Bysshe Shelly (1792–1822)

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.”

Editors’s note: Ozymandias is Ramesses II of Egypt

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Temple d’Abu Simbel / Public domain