
Why Do So Many Egyptian Statues Have Broken Noses? - longdefeat
https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-egyptian-statues-broken-noses
======
LeanderK
> Such a practice seems especially outrageous to modern viewers, considering
> our appreciation of Egyptian artifacts as masterful works of fine art, but
> Bleiberg is quick to point out that “ancient Egyptians didn’t have a word
> for ‘art.’ They would have referred to these objects as ‘equipment.’” When
> we talk about these artifacts as works of art, he said, we de-contextualize
> them.

this is very interesting and I have never thought about it in this way. One
could really think of it as equipment, serving a real purpose (or having
served and now makes a nice peace of a wall somewhere else).

I wonder what the acient egyptions would think of our appreciation of their
statues?

~~~
dalbasal
We kind of don't have a word for "art" either.

Historically/etymologically, art means "skilled work" or just "stuff made by
people" (as in artifact). The word/concept seems to have evolved gradually to
its current meaning with all its complex connotations of beauty, metaphorical
depth and existing for its own sake.

Even early modern and Renaissance art was probably seen differently to how we
see it. A lot of the best statues and paintings had religious purposes, kind
of like Egyptians.

~~~
Bartweiss
> _A lot of the best statues and paintings had religious purposes, kind of
> like Egyptians._

I think it's worth distinguishing religious _works_ from religious _tools_.

As I understand it, religious works were generally made to glorify God in a
cultural sense - mostly as commissioned works to make churches and cathedrals
more impressive. That's substantially different than pieces with intrinsic
religious significance, whether as a literal idol, a vessel for a soul, or an
offering to a divinity. For instance, a relief of a Pharaoh might be
considered significant while placed in a sealed tomb, even worth opening the
tomb to deface, but a pietà shut up in a basement is largely irrelevant.

It's an interesting point, though, because the distinction can definitely get
fuzzy. The Stations of the Cross can be performed by simply carrying a blessed
cross, but it's hard to deny that the construction of actual stations is the
creation of an artistic religious _tool_. (And of course, an archaeologist
would find the stations, but not necessarily have a way to know about the
practice without implements.) Rosaries and reliquaries are clearly functional
art, and even devotional paintings become ambiguous when literacy and
ownership of a Bible aren't standard.

I think there's still a worthwhile distinction here between
artistic/instructional and instrumental works, but I'm not sure it would hold
across faiths or larger time spans.

~~~
z3phyr
If you think it from a non-abrahmic perspective, most of the religious works
were actually practical tools or stages to perform worship or sacrifices. Most
of the statues were actively used for worship (albeit vanity must have played
a role)

~~~
dalbasal
Also Abrahamic. The religion described in the bible is one centered around
temple sacrifice, with very specific tools described (including the temple
itself) for performing these "works," as they're referred too.

------
eu
I was going to mention about Napoleon's troops shooting the nose off the
Sphinx, but did a search to confirm:

> ...he face of the Sphinx was vandalized in 1378 A.D. by Mohammed Sa'im al-
> Dahr, a "fanatical sufi of the oldest and most highly respected sufi convent
> of Cairo." [0]

[0] [https://www.napoleon-series.org/faq/c_sphinx.html](https://www.napoleon-
series.org/faq/c_sphinx.html)

~~~
lostlogin
Obelix inaccurately gets the blame too sometimes.
[http://domenglishcorner.blogspot.com/2012/11/the-sphinxs-
nos...](http://domenglishcorner.blogspot.com/2012/11/the-sphinxs-
nose.html?m=1)

------
throwaway434234
You see this in India at every temple that was raided by Muslims. The logic
being that breaking the nose would make the "idol" unfit for worship.

There probably are a lot of examples in the North (they are now part of some
"secular" Mosque complex), but it's very apparent in some of the Hoysala
temples that were partially/fully destroyed (esp. Halebidu), and in
Vijayanagara. It's really quite sad. Then again, I suppose this adequately
reflects India's state as a civilization... so SNAFU.

~~~
fdloo3
Well the other side of the coin is, Indian civilization survives. The same
language, rituals, stories, music, food, imagery used, are all pretty much
alive outside and inside thousands of temple even today. Those aspects of
culture have somehow weathered invasion, natural disasters, famine, and
drought. You can't say the same about Egyptian civilization.

~~~
danans
> The same language, rituals, stories, music, food, imagery used, are all
> pretty much alive outside and inside thousands of temple even today.

Technically, it's not the same language, culture, etc. The living culture has
changed considerably over the centuries both organically and via outside
influences, including Islam.

The surprising thing about India is that it has kept around so much of the
really ancient stuff while also adding a huge amount of new stuff along the
way. Cultural hoarding, if you will.

It's like the cultural change process is sedimentary, with previous layers
being preserved below, while the newer layers get added above, giving a kind
of continuity, whereas in other parts of the world, it has often tended to be
a more volcanic process, with the destruction of what preceded.

Also, Indian culture long ago accepted what to Western thinking seems like a
contradiction of polytheistic icon based religious worship and the belief in a
more abstract deity, or even atheism.

In the West, this resulted in the complete disposal of the previous pantheons,
but in India, it was rationalized through a "many perspectives" lens where all
the viewpoints could be accommodated.

~~~
Aromasin
How it was described by my Indian friends was that, at least in their
households, the religious stories were treated more like 'campfire stories';
not practically real, but entertaining, and good for teaching morality (that's
not to say that there aren't Hindus that take it very seriously). This is as
opposed to how most westerners treat religion, in a very literal sense -
Moses/Muhammed/Jesus DID exists and their teachings ARE the word of God, and
they must be strictly adhered to.

~~~
danans
Yes, that description represents my experience also. Even religious rituals
were treated that way - as a means to develop focus and self-discipline.

That said, in the same households, people can still be very superstitious,
because practically, sometimes being that way helps you explain otherwise
difficult things that happen in life.

------
intrasight
I had the question, after visiting Rome, of why so many Roman statues lacked a
penis. Found this. But I'm sure that in many cases it was just due to the fact
that appendages on statues are more easily damaged - whether nose or penis.

[http://ourromanadventure.blogspot.com/2009/10/where-are-
all-...](http://ourromanadventure.blogspot.com/2009/10/where-are-all-
penises.html)

~~~
dharmon
I remember reading Da Vinci Code (awful book) and he (the protagonist) made
this claim, that there was a "Great Demasculation" to remove penises from
statues.

I tried looking it up but couldn't find anything to support that this was
true. But this was 2003 so information on the web wasn't as plentiful or easy
to find.

A simpler explanation is, as you say, that they are just more easily broken.

~~~
Bartweiss
On one hand, it's well-established that the Catholic Church was uncomfortable
with nude art, not only in Christian works but in Roman-era 'heroic nudity'.
On the other hand, the reason that's well-documented is that we know a great
deal of art, including statuary, was altered by adding fig leaves and other
concealments to hide nudity.

I guess it's possible that lesser works were simply defaced instead of being
altered, but given how much hand-wringing was devoted to altering statues,
it's the sort of practice I'd expect to be well-documented, and I've never
seen any evidence to that effect. I'd guess you're right: it's yet another
case of Brown grabbing a random pattern and inserting meaning for it.

------
rodionos
Not having a nose is ok compared to having a half of the head attached from
another sculpture. This was the case in imperial Rome when the sculptors had
to quickly retrofit works in progress to fit the new emperor. In some periods
you had three emperors succeed each other, most certainly involuntarily,
within a period of three years.

~~~
freshm087
You don't need to go that far back in time, changing statues heads was a thing
in USSR.

------
ComputerGuru
I'm not sure the hypothesis stands up to scrutiny (apart from being based
solely off of conjecture, that is).

In the article, they link to the MOMA exhibit captioned "Yuny and his wife"
[0], which depicts a male with a smashed-off nose seated next to, presumably,
his wife with her nose very much intact.

If robbers smashed the noses off of statues so their likenesses would not live
in the afterlife to seek revenge, why would only one of the two people
depicted in the same carving have their nose smashed off?

[0]: [https://www.artsy.net/artwork/unknown-egyptian-yuny-and-
his-...](https://www.artsy.net/artwork/unknown-egyptian-yuny-and-his-wife-
renenutet)

~~~
jedberg
Edit: Apparently Egypt was more progressive than I thought. Women did have
more rights than most ancient societies.

Women were considered property of their husbands. If the husband is dead the
wife can’t do anything because she is masterless.

~~~
astazangasta
This is dead wrong. Property passed matrilineally and women had many rights in
ancient Egypt.

------
cafard
A lot of ancient statues, not only Egyptian, have broken noses. Henry Fielding
has a joke about it in _A Journey From This World to the Next_. The narrator,
as is customary, pays his first visit in the next world to the disorder that
killed him. Seeing the statues of famous victims, he imagines them antiques,
but learns that, no, they are quite recent.

------
legohead
Sounds like a lot of guessing. Apparently nothing is written in stone as to
why they did this. The explanation reminds me of english teachers trying to
interpret poems.

It's also odd they mention removing the left arm has significance, but show
pictures of statues with the right arms removed...

My guess is it is related to some common speech, like a saying, or a gesture
of some sort. Like flicking of the nose is a 'fuck you', and so people chop
off the noses of things to insult or show objection to the subject. But, like
the article, just a guess.

~~~
Digit-Al
From the article:

> In statues intended to show human beings making offerings to gods, the left
> arm—most commonly used to make offerings—is cut off so the statue’s function
> can’t be performed (the right hand is often found axed in statues receiving
> offerings).

So they do actually mention the right arm as well.

------
Simulacra
"“The damaged part of the body is no longer able to do its job,” Bleiberg
explained. Without a nose, the statue-spirit ceases to breathe, so that the
vandal is effectively “killing” it. To hammer the ears off a statue of a god
would make it unable to hear a prayer. In statues intended to show human
beings making offerings to gods, the left arm—most commonly used to make
offerings—is cut off so the statue’s function can’t be performed (the right
hand is often found axed in statues receiving offerings)."

------
diminish
Just couldn't read because Page down, or down arrow doesn't scroll on firefox.
Very weird behavior.

------
joveian
Reminds me of the movie Skins:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skins_(2002_film)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skins_\(2002_film\))

Statues (and sculpture generally) still have power and not always in a good
way.

------
beirut_bootleg
Wish I could read this. Unfortunately artsy.net shows a cookie consent popup
on mobile with the label "Agree" next to the popup close icon, and on desktop
it just straight out writes the cookies without asking.

------
lqet
Well, this not what I learned as a kid:
[https://youtu.be/Ea_9yGV61Dg?t=24](https://youtu.be/Ea_9yGV61Dg?t=24)

------
DerSaidin
To stop the Goa'uld from getting in?

~~~
gwbas1c
Hahahaha!

I wish Hacker News had a way to flag this post funny.

(Parent is a Stargate reference)

------
hprotagonist
I’d always understood that particular ritual mutilation to be an ersatz penis.
Noses protrude, too, after all.

------
agnelvishal
Nose cut is a sign of being mocked

------
enterx
asked myself the same question few days ago.

Statues in general.

First guess, face hit during civil unrest.

------
NelsonMinar
The computer geniuses here at Hacker News have decided the main argument of
this article are wrong. But among archaeologists ritual defacement is
understood to be a regular thing that happens to art all over the world.

Roman coins defaced: [https://www.coinsweekly.com/en/Defacing-the-past-
damnation-a...](https://www.coinsweekly.com/en/Defacing-the-past-damnation-
and-desecration-in-imperial-Rome/4?&id=4384)

Teotihuacan icons demolished and destroyed by fire:
[https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2017/sep/24/teotihu...](https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2017/sep/24/teotihuacan-
pyramids-treasures-secret-de-young-museum-san-francisco)

~~~
soneca
I had to collapse about 8 threads to find the first comment of someone
doubting the argument (in a polite way).

Your comment is popular because you are fighting a "easy-to-hate" minority
that is only relevant because you made it so.

You make fun of a kind of HN commenter that you find typical. But if your
comment is the most popular (#1 now), and assuming that people are upvoting
you because they agree that it is indeed typicial, it means that this type of
commenter is not typical at all. It is an outlier, properly undervoted by the
real typical commenter.

So your comment being upvoted disproves itself. Quite a paradox (or just
irony?).

~~~
laurent123456
It's quite common that the top comment asks "why is everybody saying X", as if
X was a widespread opinion. But then you have to scroll three pages down to
find the comments being referred too, and they are usually heavily downvoted.

~~~
atomical
Check the comments on stories related to diet. You'll see all sorts of crazy
pseudoscience being peddled. There are a lot of smart people here, but even
smart people can be led astray.

------
fwip
I'm surprised that the article didn't mention another popular theory: that
many of the Egyptian statues taken by Europeans had their noses deliberately
broken to obscure their blackness.

As the theory goes, in order to make the statues seem like high art, it was
necessary to make the culture seem more like the ancient Greeks and Romans.
Removing their noses made it so the viewer could more easily read the statues
as "like us," rather than the "primitive" countries of black people that
Europe was busy exploiting.

~~~
danans
This theory doesn't hold up not the least because the surviving
representations of noses in statuary don't look particularly "black"
(interpreted very narrowly as the west sub-saharan facial phenotype), which is
the image of Africans around which most Eurocentric racism is built.

Look the statue in the article with an intact nose, and also the statues of
the seated pharoahs at Abu Simbel. To my eyes, they just look a lot like
egyptian people today, stylized for artistic purposes.

~~~
novacole
> the surviving representations of noses in statuary don't look particularly
> "black"

I think this says the exact opposite of what you want it to say. The fact that
they survived, may be that they were sufficiently non-"black" looking to leave
them alone. Phenotypes come in ranges especially for black people, so a
"black" nose is anything from the nose of a random Scandinavian to that of a
Sudanese persons.

~~~
danans
Sure, that's another interpretation, and I agree that the notion of a single
"black" phenotype is fundamentally incorrect, which is why I qualified it.

Anyways, the theory would be easily tested by finding examples of statues with
the supposedly unacceptable noses that survive today, and see if they can be
correlated with the ones Europeans took.

The other thing that doesn't make sense about the theory is that if the
Europeans actually respected the Ancient Egyptian culture enough to want the
statues, why would they deliberately damage the presumably very valuable
artifacts?

It would would be like someone buying a Van Gogh painting only to destroy it.

~~~
novacole
The only reason there is any confusion about this is because the modern day
Egyptian looks non African. And the only reason for this is because the
indigenous population was displaced by Arab people during the spread of Islam.

Whether or not the noses were intentionally destroyed or not it is most
parsimonious to believe that the indigenous people of Egypt were African
people. Thinking they werent would be like looking at the population of The
United States today and believing the Native Americans were white (and if we
didn’t have photographic evidence of the natives we can be sure that would
have been suggested, and if anyone suggested otherwise they would have been
met with “what a crackpot theory!”).

In either case, the Europeans revered ancient Egypt for sure. But this is only
because of their mention in the Bible and their interaction with the Ancient
Greeks. But when Western Europeans got there, the people who lived in Egypt
looked more like them than Africans. But this is only because of the
displacement of the indigenous population serval centuries earlier.

~~~
danans
> Whether or not the noses were intentionally destroyed or not it is most
> parsimonious to believe that the indigenous people of Egypt were African
> people.

Of course, Egypt is part of the African continent. But I suspect that what you
mean by African here is a set of physical phenotypical features that we
sometimes pin on that term today.

There no evidence to suggest that was the only phenotype in ancient Egypt. If
anything, artifacts seem to suggest that the population was multiethnic,
comprised of a variety of phenotypes. That shouldn't be surprising - it was
the central metropolis and power of the ancient western world, like NYC or
London today, so it attracted people from everywhere.

> But this is only because of the displacement of the indigenous population
> serval centuries earlier.

As referenced in another comment, recent genetic analysis of ancient egyptian
remains have disproved this, and demonstrated that they weren't so different
from other modern middle eastern populations, and were also related to sub-
saharan populations.

------
vrinimi
A conjecture that I entertain, allowing a bit of validity to Julian Jaynes'
"bicameral mind" theory:

Egyptians back then could literally hear commands from statues as
representations of the gods. Maybe breaking off the noses muted the voices
(not sure why noses and not mouths). Warring factions might have wanted to
mute opposing gods and install their own.

~~~
circlefavshape
"Egyptians back then could literally hear commands from statues as
representations of the gods"

What?

~~~
simiones
It's an entertaining (though certainly wrong) theory that states that ancient
peoples' minds were divided into a "conscious" part that executed commands
given by the other part, which it perceived as "gods speaking to it". More
(and better) explanations on wikipedia:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicameralism_(psychology)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicameralism_\(psychology\))

------
lohszvu
Because they were built by Africans with wide noses. When they were conquered,
they were altered to look more like the new king/god. See: Sphinx's tiny head

