On October 16, 2026, Egypt revealed that a farmer's inscribed granite block in the Nile Delta led archaeologists to colossal fragments of Ramesses II, the pharaoh behind the poem 'Ozymandias.'
The news: a villager in Egypt's Gharbia Governorate reported an inscribed granite block on his land, and the Supreme Council of Antiquities unearthed two colossal Ramesses II fragments.
The pharaoh behind the find: a 66-year reign, the clash at Kadesh, and the temples of Abu Simbel that earned him the name Ramesses the Great.
TED-Ed puts Ramesses on trial: visionary leader, or a master propagandist who carved his name over everyone else's monuments?
The Smithsonian Channel on Ramesses' glittering capital, a city that vanished so completely archaeologists spent decades hunting for it.
A colossal Ramesses head hauled from the Ramesseum in 1816 sparked Shelley's famous sonnet about the ruins of empire.
Shelley's 1818 poem turned a shattered colossus into a warning. 'Ozymandias' is the Greek rendering of Ramesses' throne name, User-Maat-Re.
A line-by-line close reading of the sonnet, where 'Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair' meets a desert of broken stone.