One thing history teaches is the transience and futility of power, and the ultimate impotence of those who exercise it. That is the lesson of the current King Tut exhibition. No group of sovereigns ever enjoyed the illusion of power more than the pharaohs of the New Kingdom, especially those of the 18th and 19th dynasties. Rameses II spent much of his 66 years on the throne having immense images of himself displayed everywhere from Luxor to Abu Simbel, and many remain, chipped and crumbling. Nothing else. The point is admirably made in Shelley's sonnet about him, 'Ozymandias'. I once...