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“Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!”

“Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!”

Last updated on: September 16, 2026 at 10:43 am by Dan Peterson

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“Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!” 2026-09-16T10:43:01-06:00 Dan Peterson

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Part of the Temple of Ramses II (“the Great”) at Abu Simbel, far to Egypt’s south and its border with Sudan. (Wikimedia Commons public domain image) The companion temple that Ramses dedicated to his wife Nefertari — but which is likewise mostly about himself — is located roughly a hundred yards away to the left.

Pharaoh Ramses II (aka “Ramses the Great”; ca. BC 1303–1213) ruled over the Egyptian New Kingdom for roughly 67 years. One of the few pharaohs who were worshipped as deities during their lifetimes, he was responsible for massive building projects at Luxor, Karnak, Memphis, Abu Simbel, and other locations throughout Egypt. He also often had his artisans carve over or replace existing royal cartouches on statues and obelisks that had originally been made for earlier rulers such as Amenhotep III or Thutmose III. Sculptors sometimes even reshaped the facial features on statues of previous pharaohs in order to match Ramses II’s royal style. He has been dead for roughly 3239 years now, and, unsurprisingly, later pharaohs subsequently did the same thing to him.

The Colossi of Memnon (Wikimedia Commons public domain image) These two statues of Amenhotep III (Eighteenth Dynasty; ca. 1388-1349 BC), located on the western bank of the Nile across from Luxor, are all that remains of his massive memorial temple. (Wikimedia Commons public domain photograph)

In ancient Greek sources, Ramses II is called Ozymandias, a name that is derived from the first part of his Egyptian-language regnal name: Usermaatre Setepenre. (“”The Maat of Ra is powerful—chosen of Ra”). Whenever I take a tour group to visit the so-called Colossi of Memnon on the western side of the River Nile across from Luxor, I make it a practice to read the poem Ozymandias, by Percy Bysshe Shelley, to my group.

The Colossi of Memnon were actually created as statues of the great New Kingdom pharaoh Amenhotep IV (reigned either BC 1386–1349 or BC 1388–1351/1350), marking the entrance to his enormous funerary temple or mortuary temple. Such royal temples were constructed as permanent ritual sites in which a deceased pharaoh would be worshipped and in which his ka — his life force or protective spirit — would be supplied with perpetual food, drink, and other goods. The two severely damaged statues are, now, essentially all that is left of Amenhotep III’s vast temple complex. By the early Christian era, they were thought by Greek and Roman visitors to represent the mythological King Memnon of Ethiopia, whose brief career and death are mentioned in Homer’s Iliad.

I don’t know much, if anything, about the actual character of Amenhotep III (aka “Amenhotep the Great” or “Amenhotep the Magnificent”; like Ramses II, he was worshipped as a god while still living), but the desolation surrounding his two forlorn statues, the last major remnant of what was once clearly the very large and impressive stone mortuary temple of the man who might have been the most powerful ruler of his time in the entire world — a man of whom very few people today have ever so much as heard the name — has always struck me as a powerful reminder of human transience and vanity, and of the ephemeral character of fame. Hence the relevance of Shelley’s Ozymandias:

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.”

The colossal statue of Pharaoh Ramses II that lies just inside the gated entrance to the archaeological remains of ancient Memphis (Wikimedia Commons public domain image)

The empty tombs of the mighty pharaohs in the Valley of the Kings, and the great but empty pyramids of their royal predecessors, also summon up such thoughts, and put me in mind of the first chapter of the biblical book of Ecclesiastes:

2 Vanity of vanities, says the Preacher,
    vanity of vanities! All is vanity.
3 What does man gain by all the toil
    at which he toils under the sun?
4 A generation goes, and a generation comes,
    but the earth remains forever.
5 The sun rises, and the sun goes down,
    and hastens to the place where it rises.
6 The wind blows to the south
    and goes around to the north;
around and around goes the wind,
    and on its circuits the wind returns.
7 All streams run to the sea,
    but the sea is not full;
to the place where the streams flow,
    there they flow again.
8 All things are full of weariness;
    a man cannot utter it;
the eye is not satisfied with seeing,
    nor the ear filled with hearing.
9 What has been is what will be,
    and what has been done is what will be done,
    and there is nothing new under the sun.
10 Is there a thing of which it is said,
    “See, this is new”?
It has been already
    in the ages before us.
11 There is no remembrance of former things,
    nor will there be any remembrance
of later things yet to be
    among those who come after.

The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington DC
(Wikimedia Commons public domain photograph)

In other news: This morning, I asked former President Ronald Reagan — whom I enthusiastically supported in his campaigns for both the Governor’s Mansion in California and the White House — for his opinion on the current turmoil about renovating the Kennedy Center in Washington DC. In answer, he reminded me of a plaque that sat on his desk during his tenure as Governor of California and then as President of the United States. The inscription on it read as follows:

There is no limit to what a man can do or where he can go if he doesn’t mind who gets the credit.

Mr. Reagan also reminded me that official bronze/metal replicas of the plaque are available for purchase from the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation Store for $32.95.

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