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]