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 tons 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.
