Episode 2: King of Kings
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The necropolis at Thebes was already ancient history when Diodorus Siculus arrived there in the first century BC. He was seeking material for his magnum opus: a history of the world in 40 books. Diodorus was a Greek historian, you see; and the first volume of his Bibliotheca Historica was devoted to Egypt. And while scholars debate—as scholars will do, about everything, forever—whether or not Diodorus actually travelled to the places he wrote about, it is probable that he came here, to Thebes, outside the modern city of Luxor, midway down the Nile river. Hello, and welcome to Rime, where we’re telling colossal tales from the history of poetry. I’m your host, MJ Millington.
Thebes is home to the famous Valleys of the Kings and Queens, but also to a massive royal funerary complex known as the Theban necropolis. Diodorus had much to write about here, despite the fact that the temples consecrated to the glory of the pharaohs were more than a thousand years old by the time he toured the site. Some of the temples and memorials had already been quarried for their stones; some were already half-buried, half-forgotten. But Diodorus, perhaps with a Greek-speaking guide or guidebook, found much to describe, such as the monumental statues flanking the entrance to a particular temple. One of these statues, beautifully carved from red granite, could only be described as colossal: Diodorus tells us that the measure of its foot alone exceeded 7 cubits. For comparison, the Great Pyramid at Giza measures 280 cubits high, which equals 62 feet or 19 meters. So that’s a pretty big foot.
And the statue that that foot belonged to carried an inscription, which Diodorus translated for his readers—so it is that simple acts of translation often carry unforeseen consequences, and have very long lifespans. Because Diodorus did not record the Egyptian name of the pharaoh represented by this colossal statue; we know him today as Ramses II, or Ramses the Great, who ruled Egypt for 66 years from 1279 to 1213 BC. Instead Diodorus translated one of the pharaoh’s prenomens—the five royal names that make up the throne name of an Egyptian ruler, which was in a cartouche on the statue’s upper right arm. And because we no longer know quite how ancient Egyptian was pronounced, hopefully it won’t matter that I’m about to butcher the pronunciation of that name: User-maat-re, that kings of kings, whom Diodorus called Ozymandias.
Eighteen hundred years later, Egyptomania had seized Europe—not for the first time, and not for the last. In 1816 English traveller Henry Salt arrived in Cairo to take up the diplomatic position of Consul General of Egypt, and in short order obtained a firman from Pasha Mehmet Ali allowing for the excavation and removal of Egyptian antiquities to England. And so an Italian adventurer and polymath called Giovanni Battista Belzoni was sent to Thebes, to begin the protracted process of excavating the fractured bust of a colossal statue identified as Memnon, an Ethiopian king and gallant fighter in the Trojan war; son of Tithonus and Eos, goddess of the dawn.
Napoleon himself had tried, and failed, to secure the bust of Memnon for the Republic in 1798, during the same expedition that uncovered the Rosetta Stone. His engineers had been unable to shift even that fragment of the once-whole statue. The story goes that they drilled a hole into his chest, slipped some dynamite inside, and then lost the nerve to light it, and finish this quote-unquote excavation. Small favors.
Belzoni, who amongst his many guises was also a inventor and hydraulic engineer, had problems of his own trying to excavate the statue; he too stopped short of blowing it up, thankfully. But his trials in attempting to move the 7-ton bust over the sands between Thebes and the bank of the Nile, where it could be loaded onto a ship, were Herculean. It took 130 men to drag the roped bust, on rollers, across the sand. On the first day they covered only a few yards. After several more days and 150 yards, the bust sank into the sand. After a detour of 350 yards on firmer ground, and 17 days after they had begun, the workers finally made it to the river. It was August 1816: it would take another year and a half for the bust to reach England.
These events were in the air when two friends met a few days after Christmas, 1817, and began to converse about ancient Egypt and Diodorus Siculus. Of particular interest was the now well-known epithet that Diodorus had attributed to Ozymandias: King of Kings. As often occurred in their circle, conversation turned into a friendly challenge: each would write a sonnet on the subject of Ozymandias.
Most people know one of the sonnets that emerged from this contest: Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “Ozymandias.” You may have read it in an anthology at school, like I did--I remember it blowing my teenage mind. But there was a second sonnet created that day, by Shelley’s friend and fellow poet Horace Smith. Smith was a stockbroker, and good at it; he was less skilled at poetry, but that doesn’t bother us. He originally called his poem “Ozymandias” as well, but later changed it to “On a Stupendous Leg of Granite, Discovered Standing by Itself in the Deserts of Egypt, with the Inscription Inserted Below.” Whew.
Ozymandias by Horace Smith
In Egypt's sandy silence, all alone,
Stands a gigantic Leg, which far off throws
The only shadow that the Desart knows:—
"I am great OZYMANDIAS," saith the stone,
"The King of Kings; this mighty City shows
"The wonders of my hand."— The City's gone,—
Nought but the Leg remaining to disclose
The site of this forgotten Babylon.
We wonder,—and some Hunter may express
Wonder like ours, when thro' the wilderness
Where London stood, holding the Wolf in chace,
He meets some fragment huge, and stops to guess
What powerful but unrecorded race
Once dwelt in that annihilated place.
Smith has taken pains here to compare London with Babylon (standing in for desert cities in Egypt); Babylon was, and still is, a by-word for sin, decadence, and corruption, and so Smith is drawing a very pointed comparison between the once-powerful, now-forgotten city of sin with London itself, its own kind of Babylon. His poem has a moral, but one that’s fairly limited in scope—speaking merely of decadent Regency London, moored in place and time. Shelley, on the other hand, goes further. Sonnets were not his usual form; but you wouldn’t know it from reading this.
Ozymandias by Percy Bysshe Shelley
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.”
Shelley strikes blows at tyranny all throughout his poetry; but maybe nowhere more powerfully than in this poem. Do you remember the first time you read it? The terrible irony of that fallen, forgotten statue in the desert; its proclamation of unending glory rendered absurd. It struck me a blow the first time I read it, and affected me far more than most poetry had up to that point.
The sonnets that Shelley and Smith produced that Christmas holiday were published in January and February of 1818 in The Examiner, a journal edited by their friend and fellow Romantic (with a capital R), Leigh Hunt. Also in January 1818 the London Quarterly Review announced that Henry Salt’s first shipment of Egyptian antiquities—including the colossal bust of Memnon that Belzoni had excavated in 1816, was tantalizingly close to arriving on English soil. The Quarterly Review called the bust “the finest specimen of ancient Egyptian sculpture which has yet been discovered.” At this point it was a miracle that it would be arriving at all.
After reaching the banks of the Nile at Luxor in August 1816, the bust waited three months before being loaded onto a boat, a feat that could not have been accomplished without Belzoni’s gifts for hydraulic engineering. It was the first of many long waits on this journey, and the statue bore it as statues do: patiently, stoically, placidly even. Once finally loaded, it took a month to float to Cairo, then another month to get to Alexandria. There it was placed in one of the Pasha’s storehouses, to wait for a vessel that could take it to England. It waited almost a year. In October 1817 the bust was transferred to the transport ship Nearchus, and embarked for Malta. But that movement was short lived. All ships travelling the Mediterranean between the Ottoman Empire (of which Egypt was a part at this time) and Europe were forced to quarantine at Malta for several weeks before being allowed to continue on. And so the bust waited once again. And at the end of its quarantine period it was transferred once again, this time to a Royal Navy storeship called the Weymouth. Sometime in December 1817 or January 1818 the Weymouth departed Malta. The voyage was favorable, and she docked in England on March 14, 1818. It had taken close to two years for the bust to arrive in its new home.
Two days before the Weymouth’s arrival, Shelley packed up his complicated household—which we’ll cover in a future episode—and moved his family and satellites to Italy, leaving England forever. It’s one of poetry’s tall tales that Shelley wrote his poem after seeing the statue at the British Museum, but he never actually got to see the monumental bust—monumental still, despite being only a fragment of the original colossus. A fragment separated from its homeland, separated even from its name. For the name that was given to the statue by its excavators—Memnon—was a misidentification that had already lingered for more than a hundred years, since the first European travellers arrived in Egypt and started randomly naming things. It took Champollion himself—the man who cracked hieroglyphics—to set the record straight.
He correctly identified the complex that the statue had come from, and found it was not the Memnonium, as even Napoleon had thought, but the Ramesseum—the funerary complex of Ramses II. And the great broken bust of a pharaoh surveying his endless domain—a bust that still looks down upon visitors to the British Museum today—was not Memnon, but Ramses the Great himself—User-maat-re. He was Ozymandias.
The irony is not lost on us that the rulers of the day—who rarely take lessons from poetry, no matter the period—fought and raced each other to claim even a fragment of the pharaoh’s greatness for their own. France, England, Italy: all the competing empires of the day wanted a piece of him, literally. Because in any era, the power symbols of the past can be appropriated by a new regime, in an attempt to add authority and legitimacy to their claims for themselves. And no one would have understood that better than Ramses: he did it himself, after all, effacing the names of previous pharaohs from their monuments and temples and replacing them with his own.
All tyrants fall, eventually; statues that begin life in power and glory topple, and time wears away their original meaning. But at the last, perhaps, art remains. Because Ozymandias, paradoxically, is still with us today: in the work of an unknown sculptor upon stone, and in Shelley’s poem, where a name lives on, when all else is forgotten.
Rime is written, produced and hosted by me, MJ Millington. Our theme song is “Wizard of the Stars,” by Phillip Traum and the Moral Sense. Thanks for listening! Make sure to visit the Rime website at rimepodcast.com, that’s R_I_M_E podcast.com, where you’ll find complete shownotes for this and every episode; and the full text and recordings of all the poems mentioned. You’ll also find my own poetry and visual art, so check it out. And if you enjoy this podcast and want to support it for free, please leave Rime a rating or review wherever you get your podcasts. Those ratings really help potential listeners find the great stories we’re telling here. Until next time!
Sources
Belzoni, Giovanni Battista. Narrative of the operations and recent discoveries within the pyramids, temples, tombs and excavations in Egypt and Nubia, and of a journey to the coast of the Red Sea, in search of the ancient Berenice; and another to the oasis of Jupiter Ammon. London, J. Murray, 1821. (2nd. ed.)
[Nota Bene: Here's an awesome image from this volume of men hauling the colossal bust across the sands]
Bequette, M. K. “Two Sonnets on Ozymandius.” Keats-Shelley Journal, vol. 26 (1977), pp. 29-31.
Diodorus Siculus. The Library of History, Book 1, chapter 47. Loeb Classical Library edition, v.1, 1933.
penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Diodorus_Siculus/1C*.html
Hebron, Stephen. “An Introduction to Ozymandius.” British Library. 5 May 2014.
www.bl.uk/romantics-and-victorians/articles/an-introduction-to-ozymandias
Rée, Peta. "Belzoni, Giovanni Battista (1778–1823), performing artist and Egyptologist." Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. September 23, 2004. Oxford University Press.
www.oxforddnb.com/view/10.1093/ref:odnb/9780198614128.001.0001/odnb-9780198614128-e-2072
Robertson, Fiona. "Smith, Horatio [Horace] (1779–1849), writer and humorist." Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. May 21, 2009. Oxford University Press. www.oxforddnb.com/view/10.1093/ref:odnb/9780198614128.001.0001/odnb-9780198614128-e-25815
Rodenbeck, John. Travelers from an Antique Land: Shelley's Inspiration for "Ozymandias." Alif: Journal of Comparative Poetics, No. 24, Archeology of Literature: Tracing the Old in the New, 2004. pp. 121-148.
“The Younger Memnon.” British Museum Collection Online.
www.britishmuseum.org/collection/object/Y_EA19