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Ramesses’ success lay not only in maintaining the supremacy of the Egyptian state, through the smooth running of its trade networks and taxation systems, but also in using the rich proceeds for building numerous temples and monuments. His purpose was to create a legacy that would speak to all generations of his eternal greatness. Yet, by the most poetic of ironies, his statue has come to mean exactly the opposite.

Shelley heard reports of the discovery of the bust and of its transportation to England. He was inspired by accounts of its colossal scale, but he also knew what had happened to Egypt after Ramesses – with the crown passing to Libyans and Nubians, Persians and Macedonians, and Ramesses’ statue itself squabbled over by the recent European intruders. As Antony Gormley puts it, sculptures endure, and life dies; Shelley’s poem ‘Ozymandias’ is a meditation not on imperial grandeur but on the transience of earthly power, and in it Ramesses’ statue becomes a symbol of the futility of all human achievement.

‘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.

PART FIVE

Old World, New Powers

1100–300 BC

About 1000 BC new powers arose in several parts of the world, overwhelmed the existing order, and took its place. Warfare was conducted on an entirely new scale. Egypt was challenged by its former subject peoples from Sudan; in Iraq a new military power, the Assyrians, built an empire that eventually covered much of the Middle East; and in China, a group of outsiders, the Zhou, overthrew the long-established Shang Dynasty. There were also profound changes in economic behaviour: in both what is now Turkey and China coins were used for the first time, leading to a rapid growth of commercial activity. Meanwhile, quite separately, the first cities and complex societies in South America began to emerge.

The people of Lachish led into exile by the Assyrians

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Lachish Reliefs

Stone panels, found at the Palace of King Sennacharib, Nineveh (near Mosul), northern Iraq

700–692 BC

By 700 BC, the Assyrian rulers based in northern Iraq had built an empire that stretched from Iran to Egypt and covered most of the area that we now call ‘the Middle East’. Indeed it could be argued this was the beginning of the very idea of the Middle East as a single theatre of conflict and control. It was the largest land empire yet created, the product of the prodigious Assyrian war-machine. The heartland of the Assyrian Empire lay on the fertile Tigris river. It was an ideal location for agriculture and trade, but it had no natural boundaries or defences, and so the Assyrians spent huge resources on a large army to police their frontiers, expand their territory and keep potential enemies at bay.

Lachish, today known as Tell ed-Duweir, over 800 kilometres (500 miles) south-west of the Assyrian heartland but only about 40 kilometres (25 miles) south-west of Jerusalem, stood at a vital strategic point on the trade routes that linked Mesopotamia to the Mediterranean and the immense wealth of Egypt. In 700 BC it was a heavily fortified hill town, the second city, after Jerusalem, in the kingdom of Judah which had managed – just – to stay independent of the Assyrians. But in the final years of the eighth century BC, Hezekiah, King of Judah, rebelled against the Assyrians. It was a big mistake. King Sennacherib mobilized the Assyrian imperial army, fought a brilliant campaign, seized the city of Lachish, killed its defenders and deported its inhabitants. An Assyrian account of the episode in the British Museum gives us Sennacherib’s view of what happened, allegedly in his own words:

Because Hezekiah, King of Judah, would not submit to my yoke, I came up against him, and by force of arms and by the might of my power I took 46 of his strong-fenced cities; and of the smaller towns which were scattered about,