“ My name is Ozymandias , king of kings : appear on my works , ye Mighty , and despair ! Nothing beside rest , ” read the famous sonnet by Percy Bysshe Shelley about how gravid deed of conveyance and great people can often pass into the obliviousness of history . If there ’s a moral to the story of Ozymandias , it ’s that you may be the most powerful person in the world one day , but your busted - up statue could be lying beneath a slum another .
closely 3,000 years after his great sovereignty , component of a massive 8 - metre ( 26 foot ) quartzite rock statue of Ozymandias – now referred to as Pharaoh Ramses II – was found bury face down in the clay of suburban Cairo . The discovery was made this calendar week near where a sunshine temple founded by Ramses II once endure . Now , the area is a hapless working - class expanse known as Matariya .
Teams of Egyptian and German archeology dug up the statue on Tuesday using a mechanical digger , while locals and photographic camera - exert news crews watched on . Although they did n’t unearth any inscriptions to identify the tilt colossus , they believe that the emplacement of the find near Ramses II ’s sun synagogue is a pretty strong clue that the statue does indeed limn Ozymandias , the king of kings .
“ We found the flop of the statue and the abject part of the pass and now we remove the headspring and we found the crown and the right auricle and a shard of the right eye , ” Khaled al - Anani , Egyptian antiquities minister , toldReuters .
In a statement from theMinistry of Antiquities , Dr Aymen Ashmawy , header of the Egyptian archeology squad describe the discovery as " very important " as it confirms the tremendous size of it of Pharaoh Ramses II ’s Sunday temple and therefore the scale of his power .
Ramses the Great was the third pharaoh of the Nineteenth Dynasty of Egypt and a revere military leader between 1279 and 1213 BCE . Although it is a point of contention among historian and there ’s no real forcible grounds , many believe he could be the pharaoh in the Old Testament ’s Book of Exodus who enslaved the Israelites . He was most likely in his 1990s when he died , after which his clay were inhume in the Valley of the Kings . As further proof that metre make jester of us all , his mummified remains now lay in a locker at the Egyptian Museum in Cairo surrounded by tourists .
