a wikipedestrian stroll

 I read the following tweet:

"No one will remember
* your fancy title,
* how many hours you worked,
* how busy you were.

People will remember
* The giant monoliths you have erected to your own majesty

* Poems about the monoliths, or at least a few of the good lines

So that got me thinking about Ozymandias. Shelley took the name from a Greek version (Ὀσυμανδύας) of the Egyptian throne name of Ramses II (also Ramses III) which was Usermaatre.  Like the British, the Pharaoh adopted a new name on taking the throne.
In cuneiform, Usermaatre is 𒉿𒀸𒈬𒀀𒊑𒀀. It does not, as you would expect, mean "One who is a User inside the Matrix" but instead "the righteousness of Ra is powerful."
The big statue fragment of Ramses II hadn't arrived in the British Museum yet, but Shelley may have read about it in the newspaper, as it was slowly making its way there. The inscription comes from Bibliotheca Historica, written about 50 BC by Diodorus of Sicily. Across the Nile from Luxor is the Ramsesseum, where he reported that this inscription could be found:  "King of Kings am I, Osymandias. If anyone would know how great I am and where I lie, let him surpass one of my works." Here are the feet of the statue of Ramses:

Shelley's friend Horace Smith wrote the following poem at the same time-- the two were having a friendly competition to see who could write a better poem on the subject:
In Egypt's sandy silence, all alone,
    Stands a gigantic Leg, which far off throws
    The only shadow that the Desart knows: --
"I am great OZYMANDIAS," saith the stone,
    "The King of Kings; this mighty City shows
"The wonders of my hand." -- The City's gone, --
    Nought but the Leg remaining to disclose
The site of this forgotten Babylon.
We wonder, -- and some Hunter may express
Wonder like ours, when thro' the wilderness
    Where London stood, holding the Wolf in chace,
He meets some fragments huge, and stops to guess
    What powerful but unrecorded race
    Once dwelt in that annihilated place.

Of course this is reminiscent of MacCauley's New Zealander, the Maori from the distant future who visits the ruins of London, who is illustrated below by Dore. MacCauley may have gotten the idea partly from Shelley, who wrote:
"In the firm expectation, that when London shall be an habitation of bitterns, when St. Paul’s and Westminster Abbey shall stand, shapeless and nameless ruins in the midst of an unpeopled marsh; and when the piers of Waterloo Bridge shall become the nuclei of islets of reeds and osiers, and cast the jagged shadows of their broken arches on the solitary stream, some Transatlantic commentator will be weighing in the scales of some new and now unimagined system of criticism the respective merits of the Bells and the Fudges, and their historians."

I expect with the word "habitation" Shelley is referencing Isaiah 34, describing fallen Edom:
And thorns shall come up in her palaces, nettles and brambles in the fortresses thereof: and it shall be an habitation of dragons, and a court for owls.

The country Edom (אדום), whose name means "red" in Hebrew, is named for the red sandstone from which is carved its capital city-- Petra. Genesis gives a different etymology, though, saying it comes from Esau, who was born red all over and sold his birthright for red porridge, and whose descendents settled the area. It's also related to Adam, in the sense of the red clay from which man was created (which may also be an imaginative etymology).