Politicians love to praise themselves or arrange for others to praise them. About 3,500 years ago, the greatest of all Egyptian Pharaohs, Rameses II, obviously a politician to his fingertips, set up a huge statue to himself at Thebes. It weighed a thousand tonnes and the inscription on it read: “I am User-ma-ra, ruler of rulers, king of Upper and Lower Egypt, He of the Sedge and Bee, the mighty justice of Re, the chosen of Re. If a man wishes to know the greatness of me, here I lie, let him surpass what I have done.”
Six hundred years later, a Greek explorer, Hekataios, visited Egypt and described this great statue, although the best he could do in deciphering the name User-ma-ra in Greek terms was Ozymandias.
Hekataios’s book is now lost but the great Roman historian, Diodorus, writing in the time of Augustus Caesar, used the description of the great statue in his 40 volume history of the world.
