Mount Nemrut

In his poem ‘Ozymandias’, Percy Bysshe Shelley describes a statue’s head in the middle of the desert, broken from its body, its face buried in the sand. On the pedestal these words appear: “My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings; / Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!” Around it, nothing remains… So did Shelley know of Mount Nemrut when he wrote this poem? No; when it was written in 1817, the Western world had not yet heard of Nemrut. The statues on the summit would only be seen in 1881, by Karl Sester, a German engineer surveying a road route. Yet reading the poem, you could swear Shelley had stood on that summit, more than 2,100 meters up.