Nubiana

RAMESSESMANIA The pharaoh’s fame, as well as the prestige of the pharaonic ethos, survived the invasions and the in- troduction of other cultures to Egypt, recorded in the pages of the Bible and texts by classical authors. The Romans, who were among the first peoples to be captivated by Egyptian architecture, had numerous obelisks shipped to Rome, including some of Ramess- es II. The Napoleonic expedition to Egypt in 1799, the collections of Egyptian antiquities amassed in the early 19th Century with the subsequent discovery of other monuments as well as the decipherment of the hieroglyphs in 1822, all raised awareness of the history of this ancient civilization and the fame of Ramesses II, known at the time as “Ozymandias” (the distortion of his coronation name, User-Maat- Re, “Powerful is the Maat of Re”). The expedition made ancient Egyptian civilization extremely fash- ionable throughout Europe. The leading characters were the pharaohs and the most renowned deities, known chiefly from classical and biblical sources. In the 19th Century Egyptomania also influenced the Romantic spirit of various authors, including Shelley who in 1817 wrote the sonnet Ozymandias inspired by the fragments of a colossal statue found among the ruins of the Ramesseum. In the field of music, the story of the Egyptian pharaoh inspired Giuseppe Verdi’s Aida . The extensive coverage in the media of the transfer of the two temples of Abu Simbel fur- ther reinforced the reputation of Ramesses’ person- ality and grandeur, making him the quintessential pharaoh and a symbol of the splendor of ancient Egypt. IX Tourists posing on the colossus. About 1900.