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Why are the noses broken on Egyptian statues?

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Re: Why are the noses broken on Egyptian statues?

#61

Post by valarauko »

yantrams wrote: post #45

I've seen the same phenomena in dozens of ancient temples in India I had the chance to visit, often attributed to Islamic conquests. The native Hindu rulers weren't any less sparing either when they conquered their rivals who worshipped a different deity.

What you tend to see in India is the deliberate desecration of carvings - smashing in faces and breaking hands.

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.

Re: Why are the noses broken on Egyptian statues?

#63

Post by dsego »

taneq wrote: post #29
stanrivers wrote: post #12

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?

> Like, what is bad about hitting a statue?

I suspect vandalism.

Re: Why are the noses broken on Egyptian statues?

#64

Post by choeger »

joshuamcginnis wrote: post #37

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…

That is infuriating, disturbing, comical, and depressing at the same time.

Re: Why are the noses broken on Egyptian statues?

#65

Post by singularity2001 »

KoftaBob wrote: post #59
joshuamcginnis wrote: post #37

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…

Ironically, modern day Egyptians actually have slightly more Sub-Saharan African genetic markers than the Ancient Egyptians did. 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…

Old Egyptians where closer related to modern Europeans than to modern Egyptians.

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.

Re: Why are the noses broken on Egyptian statues?

#66

Post by Jon_Lowtek »

yantrams wrote: post #45

I've seen the same phenomena in dozens of ancient temples in India I had the chance to visit, often attributed to Islamic conquests. The native Hindu rulers weren't any less sparing either when they conquered their rivals who worshipped a different deity.

Same thing was common in Mesopotamia: There is a "breath of life" theme in the ancient mythology of the middle east that is closely related to the destruction of noses. This believe is ridiculed in the Hadith, which leads many to the conclusion that the damage must be pre-islamic, as islam would either completely destroy it or not at all, but i think that highly underrates the strong mysticism and superstition of late-ancient culture and overrates how quickly one culture replaces another while ignoring how that is accomplished in practice. Destruction of iconography during culture shifts was common in the area that spawned islam. Attacking the nose has become uncommon once they stopped making noses, so yes they kinda stopped it, but even today destruction of iconography, especially if it has religious meaning, is a very muslim thing. It is about asserting dominance and a visibly disfigured and broken statue can be better at that then one that is gone.

Re: Why are the noses broken on Egyptian statues?

#67

Post by rrauenza »

iguy wrote: post #10
jessriedel wrote: post #5

Anyone care to write an abstract for this article?

Maybe the take-away is that in different eras statues were broken in different ways for different purposes. 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…

...shave?

Re: Why are the noses broken on Egyptian statues?

#68

Post by fl0wenol »

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"?

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.

Re: Why are the noses broken on Egyptian statues?

#69

Post by notahacker »

reaperducer wrote: post #43
nxmnxm99 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I don't know. All I know is what I overheard a tour guide telling her group when I was there. But it makes sense, because I saw the same thing at all of the Christian churches I visited in Turkey.

Such iconoclasm is certainly not unique to Islam. Many older Christian churches in the UK saw their crucifixes, statues and stained-glass windows defaced by Puritans, out of belief that Catholic symbolism was idol worship rather than any superstition about the crucifixes having any actual power

Re: Why are the noses broken on Egyptian statues?

#70

Post by sudosteph »

It's a shame that there don't seem to be any primary sources from Christians of that time explaining that practice. I would imagine that the Desert Fathers would have mentioned it at some point (if it happened in their time), but perhaps they weren't aware.

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.

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