<P> The banker and political writer Horace Smith spent the Christmas season of 1817--1818 with Percy Bysshe Shelley and Mary Shelley . At this time, members of Shelley's literary circle would sometimes challenge each other to write competing sonnets on a common subject--Shelley, John Keats and Leigh Hunt wrote competing sonnets on the Nile around the same time . Shelley and Smith both chose a passage from the writings of the Greek historian Diodorus Siculus, which described a massive Egyptian statue and quoted its inscription: "King of Kings Ozymandias am I . If any want to know how great I am and where I lie, let him outdo me in my work ." In the poem Diodorus becomes "a traveller from an antique land ." </P> <P> The two poems were later published in Leigh Hunt's The Examiner, published by Leigh's brother John Hunt in London . (Hunt was already planning to publish a long excerpt from Shelley's new epic, The Revolt of Islam, later the same month .) Shelley's was published on 11 January 1818 under the pen name Glirastes . It appeared on page 24 in the yearly collection, under Original Poetry. Smith's was published, along by a note signed with the initials H.S., on 1 February 1818 . Shelley's poem was later republished under the title "Sonnet . Ozymandias" in his 1819 collection Rosalind and Helen, A Modern Eclogue; with Other Poems by Charles and James Ollier and in the 1826 Miscellaneous and Posthumous Poems of Percy Bysshe Shelley by William Benbow, both in London . </P> <P> Shelley wrote the poem in competition with his friend Horace Smith, who published his sonnet a month after Shelley's in the same magazine . It takes the same subject, tells the same story, and makes a similar moral point, but one related more directly to modernity, ending by imagining a hunter of the future looking in wonder on the ruins of an annihilated London . It was originally published under the same title as Shelley's verse; but in later collections Smith retitled it "On A Stupendous Leg of Granite, Discovered Standing by Itself in the Deserts of Egypt, with the Inscription Inserted Below". </P> <Table> <Tr> <Td> <P> Percy Shelley's "Ozymandias" I met a traveller from an antique land Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone Stand in the desert...near them, on the sand, Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown, And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command, Tell that its sculptor well those passions read Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things, The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed: And on the pedestal these words appear:' My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!' Nothing beside remains . Round the decay Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare The lone and level sands stretch far away . </P> </Td> <Td> <P> Horace Smith's "Ozymandias" In Egypt's sandy silence, all alone, Stands a gigantic Leg, which far off throws The only shadow that the Desert 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 fragment huge, and stops to guess What powerful but unrecorded race Once dwelt in that annihilated place . </P> </Td> </Tr> </Table>

Who has written the inscription on the pedestal below the statue