Why are the noses broken on Egyptian statues? • Hacker News Board

Re: Why are the noses broken on Egyptian statues?

#31

Post by hprotagonist » Thu, Oct 15, 2020, 3:57 PM UTC

ordu wrote: post #18

hprotagonist wrote: post #3

Interesting. 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.

I'm not sure that the obviousness of this kind could be trusted. The idea of "phallic" was popularized by Freud. It is understandable that we are now have phallic symbols and see them in any prolonged object, either it is because of our nature, or it is because Freud made us to see them. 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 no…

sometimes "that's a penis!" really isn't up for debate: see U+130BA: EGYPTIAN HIEROGLYPH D053.

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.

Re: Why are the noses broken on Egyptian statues?

#32

Post by t0mmyb0y » Thu, Oct 15, 2020, 4:07 PM UTC

dTal wrote: post #14

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

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.

Re: Why are the noses broken on Egyptian statues?

#33

Post by nxmnxm99 » Thu, Oct 15, 2020, 4:08 PM UTC

reaperducer wrote: post #22

The noses are broken off in order to deprive the statues of their power. It's the same reason the the Muslims scratched out the eyes of Jesus in all of the mosaics in the Hagia Sophia.

Wasn't that done because Islam rejects idol worship and the visual depiction of prophets?

Re: Why are the noses broken on Egyptian statues?

#34

Post by jazzyjackson » Thu, Oct 15, 2020, 4:17 PM UTC

42droids wrote: post #4

feralimal wrote: post #2

This is something I've noticed on a lot of older statues. Not just Egyptian ones. 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…

Is it silly to assume that a nose would break of the easiest? Like how stretched out arms are usually broken. These statues are very old.

Maybe the dangling arms of greek statues fall off over time (the article points out that statues held together with dowels are especially susceptible, vs carved from a single block)

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.

Re: Why are the noses broken on Egyptian statues?

#35

Post by throwaway2245 » Thu, Oct 15, 2020, 4:21 PM UTC

iguy wrote: post #21

throwaway2245 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So how do we have a 7000 word essay which sidesteps that claim without providing a better explanation. 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 specifical…

Lots of greek & roman statues have lost their noses too. 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…

> Lots of greek & roman statues have lost their noses too.

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.

Re: Why are the noses broken on Egyptian statues?

#36

Post by jazzyjackson » Thu, Oct 15, 2020, 4:21 PM UTC

hprotagonist wrote: post #3

Interesting. 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.

I was a kid once too, and we would make all kinds of drawings and penis jokes, but never in my years has a nose come across as phallic. I mean, what would the purpose of that symbolism be, you have to make a nose in any case if you're sculpting a statue to give a resting place for a spirit. It makes way more sense that, the mouth being closed, the breath enters and exits the nose. To make the statue uninhabitable by the spirit, you break the nose off. So that's the theory put forth by an egyptologist. Everyone in this thread is just offering what they heard somewhere.

Re: Why are the noses broken on Egyptian statues?

#37

Post by joshuamcginnis » Thu, Oct 15, 2020, 4:24 PM UTC

I once took an Africana Studies course at UMass Boston and the professor taught us that the noses were broken off the statues due to the hatred of black peoples by white explorers over millennia. She also taught us that the ancient Egyptians were black and that it was black people that built the pyramids. When I innocently asked her why the slides she showed us seemed to show Egyptians as having more middle eastern appearance, she scolded me on my prejudice and denial. I dropped the class shortly thereafter.

Re: Why are the noses broken on Egyptian statues?

#38

Post by Bayart » Thu, Oct 15, 2020, 4:31 PM UTC

throwaway2245 wrote: post #6

This article gives reasons why the statues were broken but doesn't give a convincing reason why the noses are particularly targeted (sure, you breathe through the nose - but you also breathe through the mouth). 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 surpris…

>It's now commonly suggested

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.

Re: Why are the noses broken on Egyptian statues?

#39

Post by mrwnmonm » Thu, Oct 15, 2020, 4:32 PM UTC

aidenn0 wrote: post #30

mrwnmonm wrote: post #27

I am an Egyptian. When I were young, they told us that Sphinx's nose is broken because it was shot in the 73 war.

Considering that al-Maqrīzī felt the need to write about the Sphinx missing a nose in the 15th century, that seems unlikely...

Didn't know that, thanks for the info.

Re: Why are the noses broken on Egyptian statues?

#40

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Oct 15, 2020, 4:34 PM UTC

throwaway2245 wrote: post #20

wernercd wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"it's now commonly suggested" a lot of things are commonly suggested today that have no basis in reality or no representation in real history. 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…

>This is no different than Ancient Aliens where all of history is changed to be full of Aliens. Further thought: the trope that ancient constructions were built by aliens is also in general rarely applied to ancient white civilisations.

[deleted]