12 ms·

Is there a reason to read more into it than "they're really old and brittle and noses are thin and stick out"?

by dTal 6y ago

taneq 6y ago
tl;dr yes. I'm still reading but there seems to be a long list of reasons.
t0mmyb0y 6y ago
It has been found that some were defaced to deface the predecessor and take their glory. The son of the greatest female pharoh destroyed a lot of her stuff and had a lot changed to reflect him.
pr0zac 6y ago
Its pretty easy to detect whether something was removed with a chisel (thus purposely) through marks that are left. Theres also textual evidence supporting the reasoning.
munificent 6y ago
Good question. Here's an article that answers it: https://hyperallergic.com/591628/why-are-the-noses-broken-on-egyptian-statues/ https://hyperallergic.com/591628/why-are-the-noses-broken-on...
- dwohnitmok 6y ago
  As far as I can tell the original article doesn't actually answer this. It assumes that the breakages are man-made (or restricts itself to only talking about those that are man-made) and then goes on to explain the breakages through that lens. Of course the explanations of those breakages are in turn at least some evidence that those breakages are indeed man-made, but the article doesn't go into explaining what proportion of damage is man-made. 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.
  - thesuitonym 6y ago
    >or restricts itself to only talking about those that are man-made 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.
    - dwohnitmok 6y ago
      Yes that's true. However, I view the author's conclusions about why certain damages occurred as being fairly weak. 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?
fl0wenol 6y ago
The article describes ritual icon desecration where by breaking off the nose, the spirit of the person or god depicted attempting to inhabit the desecrated icon couldn't breathe, and thus would be denied re-joining the land of the living there. 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.
- Talanes 6y ago
  If you're building a statue to have people venerate you forever, and your first act was to ruin the nose of the statue of the dude before you... How did this not become a massive nose-strengthening race?

Is there a reason to read more into it than "they're really old and brittle and noses are thin and stick out"?

by dTal 6y ago

Is there a reason to read more into it than "they're really old and brittle and noses are thin and stick out"?

taneq 6y ago

tl;dr yes. I'm still reading but there seems to be a long list of reasons.

t0mmyb0y 6y ago

It has been found that some were defaced to deface the predecessor and take their glory. The son of the greatest female pharoh destroyed a lot of her stuff and had a lot changed to reflect him.

pr0zac 6y ago

Its pretty easy to detect whether something was removed with a chisel (thus purposely) through marks that are left. Theres also textual evidence supporting the reasoning.

munificent 6y ago

Good question. Here's an article that answers it: https://hyperallergic.com/591628/why-are-the-noses-broken-on-egyptian-statues/ https://hyperallergic.com/591628/why-are-the-noses-broken-on...

dwohnitmok 6y ago
As far as I can tell the original article doesn't actually answer this. It assumes that the breakages are man-made (or restricts itself to only talking about those that are man-made) and then goes on to explain the breakages through that lens. Of course the explanations of those breakages are in turn at least some evidence that those breakages are indeed man-made, but the article doesn't go into explaining what proportion of damage is man-made. 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.
- thesuitonym 6y ago
  >or restricts itself to only talking about those that are man-made 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.
  - dwohnitmok 6y ago
    Yes that's true. However, I view the author's conclusions about why certain damages occurred as being fairly weak. 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?

fl0wenol 6y ago

The article describes ritual icon desecration where by breaking off the nose, the spirit of the person or god depicted attempting to inhabit the desecrated icon couldn't breathe, and thus would be denied re-joining the land of the living there. 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.

Talanes 6y ago
If you're building a statue to have people venerate you forever, and your first act was to ruin the nose of the statue of the dude before you... How did this not become a massive nose-strengthening race?