41–50 of 140 posts
Is there a reason to read more into it than "they're really old and brittle and noses are thin and stick out"?
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 a…
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?
Is there a reason to read more into it than "they're really old and brittle and noses are thin and stick out"?
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 Egyp…
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.
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?
Better info here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aniconism_in_Islam
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...
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…
I agree.
Part of me, completely without data and gut feel, thinks if I was going to smash a statue, I’m going for the head. 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-dat…
I'm interested in the assumption that if you're going to whack a statue around the head, hitting the face makes you an even more terrible person. Like, what is bad about hitting a statue? And what is worse about hitting its face? Can you talk more about that?