Posted on 12/15/2008 3:34:45 PM PST by SunkenCiv
An archeological team, under the direction of Egypt's well-known Antiquities chief Zahi Hawass, has begun uncovering rubble under which the largest known statue of Pharaoh Ramses II is buried in the southern Egyptian town of Sohag. The statue, which workers discovered more than 15 years ago, 476 kilometers miles south of Cairo, is finally being uncovered, according to Antiquities Chief Zahi Hawass. The Egyptian team had been hampered in its excavation work, until now, by the presence of a Muslim cemetery in the region of Akhmim across the Nile River from Sohag. Archeologists were finally able to begin their work when bodies from the modern-era cemetery were moved elsewhere. Hawass said the statue was the "largest of Ramses II" ever found in Egypt, and his team said the statue was part of a temple complex dedicated to Ramses II... French Egyptologist Bruno Argemi of the Egyptian Archeological Society of Provence, France... thinks that the discovery of the new statue is also an important event, not only because of its colossal size, but because few other remnants of his reign have been found, to date, in the Middle Egyptian region of Sohag... The granite statue of Ramses II in Sohag was first discovered in 1991 when workers were installing a foundation to build a new post office.
(Excerpt) Read more at voanews.com ...
Egypt’s Ramses Gets a New Home Among Pyramids
VOA | Aug. 25, 2006 | Leslie Boctor
Posted on 08/26/2006 1:19:40 PM PDT by FairOpinion
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1690516/posts
Egypt announces discovery of Ramses II statues
Reuters | Feb. 26, 2006 | Reuters
Posted on 02/26/2006 2:49:43 PM PST by FairOpinion
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/1586013/posts
Colossal find (Ramses II statue at Akhmim)
Al-Ahram Weekly | 12 - 18 August 2004, issue #703 | staff writer
Posted on 03/22/2005 11:28:52 PM PST by SunkenCiv
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/1368580/posts
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One of the most fascinating things I have learned about Ramses the Great was he had red hair. It was originally thought that he just dyed it red because he was old but examination of the roots of his hair revealed that DNA showed without doubt, he had red, wavy hair.
According to one source:
Ozymandias, incidentally, was Rameses II, who was survived by his pyramid if nothing else. The poem itself was inspired by a shattered colossus in the Ramesseum, his funeral temple, of which the EB says ‘This temple is
identified with the “Tomb of Osymandias” (a corruption of Ramses II’s prenomen) described by the Greek historian Diodorus Siculus in the 1st century BC’ - an inscription on the statue’s base read
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.
Of course, Shelley rendered it immortal in his sonnet:
Ozymandias
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.
— Percy Bysshe Shelley
And a condign warning to those who seek to self aggrandize.
I thought Ozymandias had a TV show in the 50s...
:’)
After they got going, early in the dynastic period, but not at the very beginning of it, the pharaohs sported five different names, called the fivefold titulary. Wow, that sounds dirty. I’d have to steal some info about the meaning of the names, since I’m not sure where the Quirke book is. ;’) Anyway, thanks (link had another link):
http://www.cs.rice.edu/~ssiyer/minstrels/poems/22.html
http://expat.savagenet.com/the-real-ozymandias/
[snip] Ozymandias (derived from one of his many names, User-maat-re. [end]
This is cool... works even though I have shut off Javascript, Java, and Flash.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/egypt/explore/ramses.html
Yeah, that is not what one would expect, but one of his five names translates as “Pawn of Cowboy Bob”, analogous to our own next leader.
I wish I could take credit for all this arcane knowledge, but frankly, until I googled “Ozymandias” and hit on the site, I had no idea that Ramses II had any connection with the name or that his statuary was the origen of the idea for the poem.
(I shouldn’t have admitted that and everyone would have thought I was a genius.)
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