As the poem begins, a “traveller from an antique land” turns ... In between, the stone remains of “Ozymandias, King of Kings,” that once-living sovereign, that work of art intended for immortality, ...

The text of his poem is as follows ... There really was an Ozymandias, who was King Ramesses II, who lived in the 19th dynasty and the New Kingdom era. Before the first translations of the ...

on which the inscription indicated that Ozymandias was “King of Kings” and that his greatness was manifest in his works. Nor was Shelley the only 19th-century Englishman to write a poem about ...

The King of Kings ... could displace his beloved Greeks. For him, “Ozymandias” could have been set anywhere—and, in a way, it was. It was a poem inspired less by a particular pharaoh ...

You wouldn't know it, but they are the shattered likeness of an Egyptian king."Ozymandias" is the Greek name for Ramesses II and was the inspiration and name of an 1818 poem by Percy Shelley.