Qualla: Ramesseum

Ramesseum: Introduction

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Tim Adams, CC BY 3.0. "My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!" Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote those lines in 1817, and the ruin that inspired them lies here, on the west bank of the Nile across from Luxor. The poet never saw it. He was reacting to news that a seven-ton granite head of Ramesses II was being hauled toward the British Museum, and to ancient accounts of a fallen colossus in the desert. The temple itself is the Ramesseum, the memorial temple of Ramesses the Great, and near its second courtyard lies exactly what Shelley imagined: a vast statue toppled and broken, a shattered face half sunk in sand, the works of a king who ruled for sixty-six years scattered across the ground. The irony is almost too perfect. The pharaoh built this place precisely so he would never be forgotten, and it became the world's most famous monument to the impermanence of power.

Read more: Ramesseum on Qualla

Image: Tim Adams | CC BY 3.0

Ramesseum: House of Millions of Years

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Christopher Michel, CC BY 2.0. Ramesses II began this temple soon after taking the throne around 1279 BC, and work continued for some twenty years. He called it the "House of millions of years" that unites with Thebes in the domain of Amun, a place where his memory would be sustained by ritual long after his d...

Read more: Ramesseum on Qualla

Image: Christopher Michel | CC BY 2.0

Ramesseum: The Fallen Colossus

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Wouter Hagens, CC BY-SA 3.0. The statue that became Ozymandias was carved from a single block of granite. Had it still stood, it would have towered roughly nineteen meters, taller than a six-story building, one of the largest free-standing statues Egypt ever made. Instead it lies broken across the temple flo...

Read more: Ramesseum on Qualla

Image: Wouter Hagens | CC BY-SA 3.0

Ramesseum: How the King Reached London

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit CC BY-SA 3.0. The Ramesseum's modern fame began with a circus strongman. In 1816, Henry Salt, the British consul, hired Giovanni Belzoni, an Italian showman turned engineer, to remove a colossal granite head and torso of Ramesses II, the so-called Younger Memnon, and ship it to England. Napole...

Read more: Ramesseum on Qualla

Image: CC BY-SA 3.0

Ramesseum: Stars on the Ceiling, Bricks in the Vaults

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit CC BY-SA 3.0. For all the grandeur, the most quietly remarkable things at the Ramesseum are small. Part of the hypostyle hall ceiling survives, painted with gold stars on a deep blue ground, a fragment of the night sky preserved for three thousand years. Behind and beside the temple stand the ...

Read more: Ramesseum on Qualla

Image: CC BY-SA 3.0

Ramesseum: The Lesson in the Sand

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Jean-Pierre Dalbéra from Paris, France, CC BY 2.0. Ramesses II was not a modest man, and the Ramesseum was meant to broadcast his glory across the centuries. In a sense it succeeded. We do remember him, more vividly than almost any other pharaoh. But we remember him through a poem about ruin, standing among broken stones where th...

Read more: Ramesseum on Qualla

Image: Jean-Pierre Dalbéra from Paris, France | CC BY 2.0