Ozymandias
The inspiration for the little vignette shown here comes from my two visits to the Mortuary Temple of Ramses II located in the desert outside of Luxor, Egypt. I was there in 1976 and again in 2003. In one of the courtyards, a large granite head of Ramses lies broken on the ground. It was the inspiration for Percy Bysshe Shelley’s poem Ozymandias published in 1818. Ozymandias is the Greek's name for Ramses II.
The scene depicted below shows three members of the British Eighth Army sometime in August 1942 shortly after the First Battle of El Alamein. Turning tourists and taking a break from the rigors of battle, these guys are visiting an Egyptian ruin. Perhaps the last non-tourist regular army soldiers to pass this way before them were Napoleon’s troops in 1799 or 1800.