King of kings

A poem for today:

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 upon 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
- Percy Bysshe Shelley


Well, Ozymandias was actually Ramesses II, a pharaoh who ruled for 67 years from 1279 to 1212 B.C. He built more temples, monuments, obelisks than any other pharoah in history. And he presided over an empire that stretched from present day Libya to Iraq in the east and as far north as Turkey and southward into Sudan.
This Shelley's poem "Ozymandias", inspired by the fallen statues at his mortuary temple at Thebes, takes its title from the Greek version of one of the ruler's alternate names : User-maat-re.

An inscription on one of the statues reads :
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.

Though Ramses II thought of himself to be immortally great, the poem goes to show how we think of things that are seemingly a pinnacle of greatness today, not realizing that for all our boasts and thoughts of self importance soon will only be a faded memory, if that. Greatness today, sad broken down statuary 2000 years down the road.
Nothing would stay on forever.