The meditation on fallen empires moves readers across cultures.

Evidence

The City of Brass meditates on the rise and fall of cities. The traveling caliphate reads inscriptions on the walls of the dead city: ‘We were great. We are dust.’ Why does this kind of meditation move readers across cultures? Compare with Shelley’s ‘Ozymandias,’ which makes the same point seven centuries later in a different language. — , A Year of World Stories, 2175

Categorization

• XREF: Cross-cultural parallel with Ozymandias; also evokes Psalm 103 and ubi sunt traditions in European medieval literature.
• QUESTION: Worth investigating why the rise-and-fall-of-empires lament has such cross-cultural staying power.