Being evil queen has never been so fun. And I am willing to do anything. We will soon be at war. You will have to take a side. War with the Protestants. What fun. A war with the Catholics. None of us are safe. Feels good to be bad. The Serpent Queen on Channel 4. Stream now.

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, 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 Ozymandius, king of kings.

Look on my works ye mighty, and despair.

No thing beside remains.

Round the decay of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare, the lone and level sands stretch far away.

In 1818, an English poet named Percy Biss Shelley published Ozymandius.

The poem is a reflection on ambition, entropy, and the immortality of art.

It also, perhaps, offers perspectives on the troubles of Shelley's own day. Composed and published less than three years

after the Battle of Waterloo, the poem all but explicitly offers a forecast for the now-exiled

Napoleon. Contemporary concerns aside, the poem Ozymandius has an inextricable link to ancient Egypt.

Shelley's poem was inspired by a colossal statue, belonging to the ancient Egyptian pharaoh

Ramesses II.

The king Usir Ma'atra, whom the Greeks and Romans knew as Ozymandias, constructed many temples to his own glory and memory along

the Nile Valley.

One of these, in what is now Luxor, contains the shattered remains of a truly colossal

statue.

A seated image of the king, it once stood in the first courtyard of the great temple which we call

the Ramesium. Originally 17 and a half to 18 meters tall, it was, along with the colossi of

Memnon, one of the largest statues ever quarried in Egypt. Today, Ramesses's figure has broken and tumbled backwards into the second court of his temple.

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