Archaeologists may have found Ozymandias statue in Egypt

Ozymandias or Ramses the Great was third of the 19th dynasty of Egypt, ruled from 1279BC to 1213BC

Archaeologists believe an eight-metre statue found in a Cairo slum may be a depiction of revered Pharaoh Ramses II aka Ozymandias, who ruled Egypt more than 3,000 years ago.

The 26ft statue, which was submerged in groundwater in the Egypt capital, was found by joint expedition of Egyptian and German archaeologists near the ruins of Ramses II’s temple in the ancient city of Heliopolis, located in the eastern part of modern-day Cairo, according to The Guardian.

Ozymandias or Ramses the Great was the third of the 19th dynasty of Egypt and ruled for 66 years, from 1279BC to 1213BC. The pharaoh led several military expeditions and expanded the Egyptian empire to stretch from Syria in the east to Nubia (northern Sudan) in the south. His successors called him the Great Ancestor.



Percy Bysshe Shelley, an English poet of the Romantic era, wrote a sonnet titled Ozymandias, which contained the line ‘Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’, in 1818 soon after the British Museum acquired a large fragment of a statue of Ramses II from the 13^th Century BC.

“Last Tuesday they called me to announce the big discovery of a colossus of a king, most probably Ramses II, made out of quartzite,” Egypt’s Antiquities Minister Khaled al Anani said at the site of the discovery.

“We found the bust of the statue and the lower part of the head and now we removed the head and we found the crown and the right ear and a fragment of the right eye,” Anani said of the new discovery.

The joint expedition of archaeologists also found the upper part of a life-sized 80cm limestone statue of Pharaoh Seti II, Ramses II’s grandson. The sun temple in Heliopolis was founded by Ramses II, lending weight to the likelihood that the statue is of him, believe archaeologists.

This article originally appeared on The Guardian