Why are the noses broken on Egyptian statues?
hyperallergic.com
hyperallergic.com
In a setting that was designed to induce awe, reverence and altered states of consciousness, an idol could prompt believers to hallucinate an appropriate command. Today, we may say that a painting "speaks" to us--perhaps these statues did so literally to the people of their time.
If that is true, then defacing these statues would be a viable strategy to inhibit their ability to trigger these hallucinations or visitations. Rivals of a religion would easily be able to cut off believers from a direct experience of their god.
[0] https://www.julianjaynes.org/about/about-jaynes-theory/overv...
Voices plural? I doubt most of society experiences such a phenomenon, and if they do they’re not talking about it.
The other more phenomenological aspects are not easily falsifiable, nor indeed verifiable. But the arguments he provides at least itch the scratch of explaining strange behaviors and characteristics of our ancestors and the relics they left behind in a way that approaches Occam's razor.
The most fundamental problem is that the dates don't line up. Causes and effects are separated by millennia.
It remains a mystery.
A bigger mystery is where the pre-dynastic Egyptians got hold of all those extremely precisely worked, very, very hard stone bowls and jugs. Some are of carborundum! All we know is that they were completely unable to make them themselves. We would be hard-pressed to make those today, using our most advanced fabrication tools.
Likewise the 50+-ton basalt boxes found empty underground at Saqqara, polished to a mirror sheen, optically flat, with interior faces exactly parallel.
First of all, there was no carborundum in ancient egypt. Silicon carbide was only discovered in the 19th century and doesn't occur in large deposits naturally. I assume you mean corundum, which is most definitely workable with time, patience, and lots of abrasive powder. All of these were part of the Egyptian toolkit.
Secondly, I assume you're referring to the sarcophagi of the Serapeum. They're impressive, but nothing outside the realm of the known tools if given enough time and skill, neither of which they were short on.
Explorer Flinders Petrie spent decades there and was left with a lot of thoughtful questions about how those artifacts might have been made with known methods. Modern engineer Christopher Dunn has the pro and evidentiary background to have raised challenging question about such facile assertions.
Also, the very first result for me was a UPenn museum article [1] from 1983 demonstrating granite drilling with known tools. Again, hardly breaking new ground here.
[1] https://www.penn.museum/sites/expedition/ancient-egyptian-st...
It is one thing to demonstrate crude granite drilling and sawing, and entirely another to actually reproduce observed phenomena. The one is not a substitute for the other.
And you can call them sarcophagi if you like, but that is a box for a corpse, and these have all always been empty. So, boxes. 100-ton boxes, machined to such tight tolerance that they seal just by seating the lid.
I too am curious to what extent natural breakage plays a role which unfortunately the article doesn't really get into.
I've seen broken noses on a lot of very diverse sculptures from across the world (Mesoamerican sculptures, Easter Island Moai heads, Greco-Roman busts, Chinese Buddhist sculptures, etc.) so I'm inclined to think at least some of the broken noses on Egyptian sculptures can be attributed to natural damage.
I would've appreciated if the article explained the ratio of natural damage to man-made damage on these noses.
As it stands I'm still not sure whether Egyptian sculptures have an outsized number of broken noses or whether it's the same ratio as all other ancient sculptures.
The author probably did that because those are the only breakages which are interesting. Erosion is interesting in its own way, but the reasons why people do things have a much wider audience.
Most strikingly none of the primary sources in the article actually describe the action of breaking a nose. More generally, none of the quotes actually describe any of the exact purposes that the article infers, e.g. the breaking a nose so that the spirit cannot breathe or breaking the arms so that the spirit cannot receive an offering.
All of this is instead inferred from passages supporting or warning against general defacement as well as post-hoc examination of damage on various statues.
You would hope that if this was a widespread and officially sanctioned practice and given generations of defacement and destruction, somewhere someone recorded "yes I cut off this statue's nose to make sure that the spirit could not breathe" or the equivalent with some other body part and spiritual function and yet this article at least has no such quote.
Of course history is full of gaps and thus it is not entirely unsurprising that there might not be literature describing this even if it were fairly widespread. Nonetheless, its lack makes me quite suspicious of the confidence in which the author describes his very specific conclusions on why certain body parts were damaged the way they were. (The most well-supported one I see so far is the thing with arms and offerings, although that depends heavily on how prevalent it is, e.g. whether this pattern holds for almost all one-armed statues, which the author suggests is true, but I'm curious about the overall stats on that)
EDIT: My suspicions have only increased after my searches on the Internet on this subject all seem to trace back to this Pulitzer Foundation exhibition. Anybody have any other sources to support the specific relationships between destroyed body part and destroyed spiritual function (e.g. no nose so can't breathe) as described in this article?
They'd also ideally remove the head completely but you'd still break off the nose if that's all you could do.
When power changed in Egypt, those who came after would desecrate the icons (statues, images) of those who came before to cement their legitimacy and prevent worship or offerings being made to the prior powers-that-be, as it was believed it prevented their spirits from re-inhabiting those icons, which would dissuade people making offerings in the first place. Whether the new rulers believed this too could be debated, but the impact was the same.
How did this not become a massive nose-strengthening race?
Since this practice doesn't seem to be a part of Christianity elsewhere, it seems like it could something unique to a coptic interpretation of scripture. I'm not qualified to interpret this - but it does appear that a coptic translation of leviticus 21:18 uses a word which is translated to "cut off nose" ( https://coptic-dictionary.org/entry.cgi?tla=C5694 ) in for a word that is usually interpreted as "flat nose" or "deformed nose" elsewhere.
Whether there's some other connection between that word and idol worship, who knows.
EDIT: found a larger quotation. From the context, the use of the quote in TFA looks like a misrepresentation of what Augustine said, since it doesn't sound like he was offering an opinion on whether or not it should be done.
https://books.google.com/books?id=z5ufDwAAQBAJ&pg=PT91&lpg=P...
It's the same reason the the Muslims scratched out the eyes of Jesus in all of the mosaics in the Hagia Sophia.
Statues don’t fight back. Real trouble is when you run out of statues.
Who the crap has a beef with Lincoln.
This isn’t out of the blue, people are stirring them up. People that have agendas.IKR? Doesn't make sense anymore. But I was talking about the parent topic, which was the theologically-motivated scratching out of the eyes of figures in mosaic images.
Heathen; “ don’t tread on me, I’m not giving up my idol!” Christin “okay fine, pray to this figurine of a saint”
Heathen: “so I can worship this idol of Saint Bernard?”
Christian: “ummm, itSs not a, ummm, okay close enough”
Proving once again that min/maxing arbitrary metrics leads to weird results.
Better info here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aniconism_in_Islam
This is pretty far from the standard narrative, but I think something happened 300 years ago. A different group moved in, and destroyed the more beautiful creations of the older group. Where there were statues on churches, these were replaced with gargoyles.
I think the nose destruction you raise is a part of that - its a simple way to 'uglify' a thing of beauty. Those Egyptian statues are representation of people that were in perfect proportions and display idealised geometry.
https://www.emotions.64g.ru/prof3/pro04en.htm
So, I think they were beautiful and destroyed intentionally by whoever conquered or moved in over the preceding group.
However (and whenever) they were made, once made, these are hard and most definitely do NOT break accidentally. Well, not so many of them as that, anyway. If it is granite, I think you could drop a statue like that and it would break your wood or marble floor, rather than break off accidentally.
But a lot of these statues have arms by their side. Further, the author mentions chisel marks and describes where a statue was hit to break it apart. I think the 'iconoclasm' explanation is fairly uncontroversial.
EDIT: i read through other comments by you and you seem to be dangerously deep down a rabid hole of believing society to be hocussed by descartes' demon, throwing around words like propaganda and indoctrination that imply evil intent and planning. There is philosophical insight in cartesian doubt, and that radical constructivism you seem to hold dear, but the path you walk is very dangerous, as it is beset by highwaymen that want to break peoples sanity and hook them on their ideology, cultism or concept of enemies. Please be careful.
A lot of these statues have broken heads too ... not all though.
When I hit the head, I’m also a terrible person, meaning I’m definitely going for the face, no?
What’s the part that I am likely to hit on the face first because it sticks out? What’s the part most likely to break on the head?
Just a no-data no-expertise thought...
Like, what is bad about hitting a statue? And what is worse about hitting its face?
Can you talk more about that?
I suspect vandalism.
So you are thinking “if this was a real person, how am I going to really ruin their day”, understanding that you are not actually attacking a person. But it sure probably feels more like it than hitting a granite tile.
It's a violent act. It doesn't mean that you are a bad person, but it is similar enough for a model.
Various Egyptian groups broke each other's statues, which they fully understood, for instance breaking the left hand of gods understood to be giving things, and the right hand of those receiving things, to prevent them from performing their function. And often digging out the inscription of the name of the king depicted -- which implies they could read it, both when it was a new regime, and when it was grave robbers (who wished to escape retribution in the afterlife).
Early Christians feared these and other pagan statues. They thought it more powerful to break just the nose, or to shave statues of Greek gods they could recognise, rather than decapitate or completely destroy them.
After the Arab conquest, they were mainly seen as just building material, and seated statues tended to be broken off to make cubic pieces for re-use. With no special regard for their identity, nor attempts to erase names. And, aside, it took about 1000 years they say for Islam to become the majority faith, not just the ruling one.
Does it? Wouldn't the name be set off in a conspicuous cartouche?
They have examples with walls of text from which I can't guess anything, but whether those are representative of inscriptions on so-damaged statues I don't know.
Answering the question of why the nose is broken on any particular Egyptian statue, relief, or sarcophagus mostly depends on two key factors: the condition of the inscription, and the original location and purpose of the statue. Additional breakage to other parts of the body or to symbols is also informative.
Iconoclasm on a grand scale — such as the destruction of royal imagery following the reign of Hatshepsut and during and after the reign of Akhenaten — was primarily political in motive. Hatshepsut’s reign presented a problem for the legitimacy of Thutmose III’s chosen successor; and Thutmose solved this problem by eliminating a significant portion of the imagistic and inscribed memory of Hatshepsut. Akhenaten’s religious revolution presented a large-scale problem for his successors, who restored the worship of the god Amun; the destruction of Akhenaten’s monuments was therefore thorough and effective.
The condition of an inscription is revealing when it is clear whether the name itself was the primary target of the destruction. Damage to the name strongly suggests that the attack took place during the Pharaonic period when hieroglyphic writing was still understood. The reasons for damage in that period are likely to have been personal animosity toward the one represented in the image or, when a criminal violates a tomb, a desire to evade a deceased person’s revenge.So, by breaking the nose off, tomb robbers 'kill' the statue's ability to bring back the spirit and thus avoid their ire.
I always thought it was the phallic symbolism
Hindu rulers tended not to do these kinds of specific acts. You could probably count on one hand the "Indic" kings documented to have specifically targeted temples or religious iconography. The most famous examples that come to mind immediately would be the razing of the temples of Pratihaspura, allegedly to smoke out a rival hiding in the ruins.
This is more of a statement about the quality of the historical record in India (which is abysmally low).
At the same time, these sort of atrocities were very much the exception, not the rule in the long history of Ancient India. I can only speculate that the eclectic nature of the population at large prevented any one group from gaining the upper hand for very long, tempering the ability to target vulnerable groups. Even most dynasties had the preferred religious tradition shifting across generations.
Is that falsifiable? We would need someplace Muslim thought held sway but they aren't broken, and places where it never penetrated and they are all broken anyway.
None of that would conclusive in isolation. You would need a lot of data; or records of fatwas issued demanding it.
Breaking or disfiguring the nose is a common punishment trope throughout human history. Perhaps this is because the nose is one of the most exposed and accessible organs on the body if one seeks to damage someone mortally, and it is also core to many cultures' concept of beauty and power, so disfiguring it destroys the target in social dimensions also.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Sphinx_of_Giza#Missing_n...
The nose is simply the most common point of impact when you strike a face from up-front(human or idol). A face is probably likely to be the most common target when raiding.
They were rare, though.
Several genetic analyses have been done on Ancient Egyptian mummies, and they tend to be most closely related to modern-day people of the Levant (Syria/Lebanon).
So if your professor was calling them black as in Sub-Saharan, the genetic evidence says otherwise. If she meant black as in dark skin, then sure, it's the Egyptian sun we're talking about after all.
Source (one of many): https://www.washingtonpost.com./news/speaking-of-science/wp/...
image: https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/516118/44733984-52...
source: https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms15694
Also remember that the Gebelein mummy and Ramses had red hair.
Suffice it to say, the genetic evidence shows that Egyptians (and their southern neighbors) are an indigenous African population, with the current residents of the region generally descendents of the people who were there 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5 thousand years ago. The question of their blackness is a political one - as blackness itself is a social construct of the modern age, predicated on appearance and political necessity rather than strict ancestry, and generally inapplicable to ancient populations. In this case, the continuous and vehement insistence that Egyptians were not "black", over a century and a half of Western scholarship and backed by varying rationales as the years proceeded, is useful as a study in the politics of race and perceived technical and societal capability.
No one gets so up in arms about whether or not the Ancient Greeks were "white" (Super-Alpine white).
Edit: I suppose I asked for it, considering my audience. Thank you for living up to my worst expectations. (Seriously, delete the post.)
You seem to be hinting at something scandalous; please do be upfront.
In any case, don’t do this here. If you have something to say, be straightforward about it and don’t insult your readers.
I don't see how understanding how ancient people looked is a political study. Yes, race is highly political, but it can be a political and historical topic. Individuals can be interested in what humans used to look like (and this is not limited to blackness) without being interested in the politics.
No one is up in arms. People are just interested. The Ancient Greeks are decidedly caucasian, there is not much discussion around that because most scholars agree.
We make models of what we think prehistoric humans and sapiens looked like and there is much interest in that without it being political. People just like knowing stuff about the past, about their ancestors. Just because some assholes politicize this sort of thing, just because some teachers push their politically charged racial bias on others does not mean that the whole topic is exclusively socio-political.
Citing genetic studies is completely valid. Real science is non-political so I'd say that's a totally rational way to approach the question of what did the people of one of the most sophisticated ancient civilizations look like.
So, again, the most interesting question becomes not of whether or not Egyptians were black - by the modern definition of blackness (itself predicated in part on notions of separating African populations), they weren't, nor where they white, or Middle Eastern, or Levantine. The most interesting question is why the assertion that they weren't black is so vociferous. That's the character of the parent and several of its replies, not clear-eyed curiosity. They represent a conclusion, not an investigation.
It's in this light - in observing this echo chamber - that I felt the need to protest, and I feel justified in doing so. Humor me and assume, for a moment, that "Egyptians were not black," being rooted in a pre-geneology, anthropology-nascent scientific understanding, is itself a political assertion. What does the rest of this discussion look like, then? How, in your default perspective, is it not political? Because of the genetic studies cited? What do those studies actually say, and what about the model you've built around them is actually an intellectual leap?
That's the conversation I want to have. Not, "Oh boy ain't my Negro Studies professor dumb?".
A thing I had heard over the years is that noses were kind of phallic (which seems pretty obvious), so if you were interested in a symbolic neutering, taking the nose off was both physically simple to do and symbolically potent.
But I'd rather not to apply this very idea to people of ancient Egypt. Or at least I wouldn't trust it's obviousness. Obvious is not a synonym of a true.
anachronistic thinking is an ever-lurking danger, though, which is why i'm not amazingly confident in this interpretation, but brought it up out of curiosity.
We do know that body-part substitutions were at least in literary use in the ancient near east, so it's not totally implausible: you can fairly confidently swap foot/thigh for genitalia in ancient hebrew texts, when contextually appropriate.
I agree.
It's now commonly suggested that the statue's noses most obviously indicated African heritage: that they were representing Black Africans - and white Christians wanted to erase that heritage.
I find it surprising that this apparently-scholarly article wouldn't touch upon that.
This is no different than Ancient Aliens where all of history is changed to be full of Aliens. Creating what you want to see out of scant evidence to support the claim. "Connecting the dots" to say what you want.
Taking history and deciding that "race" is the reason something happens... doesn't change history to make that assertion true.
Noses broke because "race"? False
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2020/09/29/fac...
One of the claims in this essay is that noses were removed by early Christians to discourage polytheism - if so, then why do ancient Greek gods still have their noses?
Whatever academic reason you can come up with, noses were ultimately targeted because someone with political power or some group of people specifically did not like these noses.
And why did they not like these noses?
Also, you may be thinking that because Egypt is in Africa, its people in 2000BC were African in the colloquial sense of today. That's far from obvious, the Sahara is wide. Although the upper Nile reaches some way across it.
I am lazy to dig for references, but IIRC the status from ancient DNA was that the fraction of sub-saharan african descent in north africa has increased slowly over the last 2000 years or so, to maybe 10% today? I don't know whether such DNA tends to represent the elite (as you might expect statues to do) or not.
Where "lots" is a much smaller percentage.
> you may be thinking that because Egypt is in Africa, its people in 2000BC were African in the colloquial sense of today.
I don't have to think this any more than I think every Roman emperor had perfect abs.
If (some) statue's noses were modelled after Black Africans, and (some) people took a conscious or subconscious dislike to this, then the consequences can be fast, or develop as a more general tradition over time, with multiple pseudo-academic cultural explanations.
Further thought: the trope that ancient constructions were built by aliens is also in general rarely applied to ancient white civilisations.
In cases where an impressive structure in Europe was created but for which no contemporary documentation survives, aliens are indeed given credit. Stonehenge comes to mind.
Which is to say it hinges on the idea that the statues were not destroyed by racist western colonialists at all, because they found ancient texts mentioning defacement of noses. They don't actually prove anything, the standards of this kind of research are incredibly low.
The problem is that western egyptologist are unlikely to go out of their way to put effort into researching what particular crimes colonialists committed. The victor writes the history books, and they probably didn't even think to write prominently anything about the countless artifacts they destroyed, to them it was all just the work of godless subhumans so why bother.
They have a very good motive to do it, and that today the decedents of the racists will go out of their way to deny it isn't surprising at all.
The whole ancient alien thing comes from a different direction, its whole foundation lies in the disbelief that african people could've ever possibly built the pyramids, even aliens is a more plausible theory to them.
If I'm recalling correctly, this comes up in Ishmael Reed's novel, Mumbo Jumbo (1972).
By whom ? One's opinion is only valuable as their credentials.
>I find it surprising that this apparently-scholarly article wouldn't touch upon that.
Then it wouldn't be scholarly.
Christian Egyptians were for the most part identical to pre-Christian Egyptians. And the foreign dynasties (Nubian and Greek) are pretty well identified.
Using post-colonial racial stereotypes to interpret Egyptian history is lunacy.
If you - like the author of this article - were a museum curator of Egyptian art within the USA then you should, perhaps, think about your exhibitions with some understanding of race and colonialism.