Kerala - At the Crossroads of the World (13th BCE - 2nd CE)

How is the great Egyptian Pharaoh Ramesses II connected to present day Kerala? A small stretch of land, in a sleepy town in Kerala hides secrets to a past when this was an international trading hub. We travel through the deep South of India to find some buried treasures.

My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:

Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’

It is said that poet P B Shelley began writing this oft-quoted poem in 1817, soon after the British Museum announced that it had acquired a large fragment of a statue of Pharaoh Ramesses II, who ruled Egypt in the 13th century BCE.

Known as Ozymandias to the Greeks, Ramesses II was a great emperor and builder. But it is only much later, while studying his mummy in his tomb in the Valley of Kings in Thebes, that archaeologists found a tantalising clue that linked Ramesses’s world of 3,300 years ago in Egypt, to a sliver of land thousands of kilometres away on the southern coast of India – Kerala.