China Study Tour: Here Lies Ozymandias, King of Kings

In 1974, a few Chinese peasants discovered the Terra Cotta warriors while digging a well in a field. The Terra Cotta Warriors are the warriors meant to accompany the First Emperor of Qin (Qin Shi Huang Di) into the afterlife – so that he could conquer it too, presumably. They are comprised of infantry, archers, cavalry, and charioteers. The Emperor Qin had them built in the latter half of his time as emperor, and they were smashed up shortly after his death in the peasant rebellions.

Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote a poem called 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.

This is the terra cotta warriors. There is no historical record of them, they had simply been forgotten about. It must be one of the most mentally damaging occurrences in the world to believe that you are something on the level of a divine being. But if there is an afterlife, and if he could still see this one, how grating it would be to watch everything you believed defined you to disappear into the sands of time.