![]() In these classical texts, the Huns were the epitome of brutal and alien savages whose raison d’etre was total victory on the battlefield, punctuated by gluttonous orgies of flesh, food and drink. The specter of these pitiless barbarians swooping in on horseback had haunted the ancients, their horror recorded in histories that filtered down to modern Europeans. When in the mid-19th-century Europeans became involved in geopolitical machinations in Central Asia and China, they resurrected a deep cultural memory and with it the fear of a violent menace from the east in the form of the Huns, nomadic warriors who had been defeated 1,400 years earlier, decades before Rome fell. Names and memories decay in history’s winds, as surely as works of stone blasted by desert sandstorms, but a select few can be powerful enough to evoke strong emotions after thousands of years if nurtured and revived. ![]() Today, despite his achievements, he is a vague and obscure name, dimly recalled. In ancient Greece, Ozymandias was the name for Ramesses the Great, the most powerful Pharaoh of Egypt’s New Kingdom. ![]() Percy Shelley’s 19th-century poem Ozymandias reflects this truth, as the ancient king of kings bellows “Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”, spared the foresight that his legacy would one day be enumerated in forgotten, decaying monuments. The Epic of Gilgamesh ends with the intimation that immortality can only be achieved through everlasting fame, or as the case may be, infamy.
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