Shelley began writing the poem "Ozymandias" in 1817, upon anticipation of the arrival in Britain of the Younger Memnon, a head-and-torso fragment of a statue of Ramesses II acquired by Italian archeologist Giovanni Battista Belzoni from the Ramesseum, the mortuary temple of Ramesses II at Thebes.

[8] Shelley, who had explored similar themes in his 1813 work Queen Mab, was also influenced by Constantin François de Chassebœuf's book Les Ruines, ou méditations sur les révolutions des empires (The Ruins, or a Survey of the Revolutions of Empires), first published in an English translation in 1792.

[9] The banker and political writer Horace Smith spent the Christmas season of 1817–1818 with Percy and Mary Shelley.

It appeared again in Shelley's 1819 collection Rosalind and Helen, A Modern Eclogue; with Other Poems,[17] which was republished in 1876 under the title "Sonnet.

Ozymandias" by Charles and James Ollier[3] and in the 1826 Miscellaneous and Posthumous Poems of Percy Bysshe Shelley by William Benbow, both in London.

[d] 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!"

[24] Several poets, including Richard Watson Gilder and John B. Rosenma, have written poems titled "Ozymandias" in response to Shelley's work.

[33] Adrian Veidt, also known as Ozymandias, is the primary antagonist in the Watchmen franchise, based on the 1986 comics by writer Alan Moore, artist Dave Gibbons, and colorist John Higgins.

character David in Alien: Covenant predicting the decline and demise of the human empire[36] and referenced in the penultimate episode of Succession.

[38] Ozymandias gilberti, a giant fossil fish from the Miocene of California that is known only from a few fragmentary remains, was named by David Starr Jordan as an allusion to the poem.