#Statue of ozymandias license#
While Shelley’s “vast and trunkless legs of stone” owe more to poetic license than to archaeology, the “half sunk… shattered visage” lying on the sand is an accurate description of part of the wrecked statue. In particular, one massive fallen statue at the Ramesseum is now inextricably linked with Shelley, because of the cartouche on its shoulder bearing Ramesses’s throne name, User-maat-re Setep-en-re, the first part of which Diodorus transliterated into Greek as “Ozymandias”. It was against the backdrop of intense excitement surrounding the statue’s arrival, and having heard wondrous tales of other, less transportable treasures still in the desert, that the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley penned his sonnet “Ozymandias”. Thanks to Belzoni’s hydraulics and his skill as an engineer (Napoleon’s men had failed in the same endeavour a decade or so earlier), the 7-ton stone head arrived in London in 1818, where it was dubbed “The Younger Memnon” and, some years later, given pride of place in the British Museum. There he met British Consul General Henry Salt, who hired his services to collect from the temple in Thebes the so-called ‘Younger Memnon’, one of two colossal granite heads depicting Ramesses II, and transport it to England.
Belzoni’s travels took him in 1815 to Cairo, where he sold Mehemet Ali a hydraulic engine of his own invention.
‘The next visitor of note was Giovanni Belzoni, a showman and engineer of Italian origin and, latterly, an archaeologist and antiques dealer. One of two fragmented statues the inspired the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley to write Ozymandias.
The so-called Ozymandias statue in the Ramesseum, Luxor, Egypt.
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