In "The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind", Julian Jaynes argues that before human intelligence was experienced as reflective, self-conscious internal monologue, early humans would routinely experience "command hallucinations" which they ascribed to gods[0].
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.
I was under the impression - not having studied much about Jaynes' theory - that it is a well-regarded but falsified theory. That being said, what you describe sounds like an amazing premise for a novel.
The most obvious refutation is that according to Jaynes' theory conciseness emerged just a few thousand years ago. Since humans took divergent paths across the globe over a hundred thousand years ago, this raises the question of how all humans developed consciousness independently and simultaneously - unless you think that consciousness is spread in a sort of memetic fashion, in which case you are asserting that aboriginal people did not have a consciousness as we would understand it prior to their contact with European colonialists, which is - to say the least - a weighty assertion to make.
Jaynes argument makes a lot more sense when you take the modern psychiatric view that the way we respond to voices in our head is socially constructed. His claim that it is literally caused by the corpus collosum was bad biology (which was not his field).
The decomposition of the self into competing voices is a fairly common idea. It's present in phrases like "part of me thinks/wants X" or "I am of two minds about X". It's a key part of the whole Freudian id, ego, superego thing and related motifs like the devil on one shoulder and the angel on the other.
The falsification usually hinges on discrediting the physiological aspects of the hypothesis: specifically, where the "commander" and the "actor" reside in the brain. Jaynes hypothesized that one lives in one hemisphere, and the other in the other, and commands are issued across the corpus callosum. This has since been disproven in favor of the perspectives centering the default mode network.
The other more phenomenological aspects are not easily falsifiable, nor indeed verifiable. But the arguments he provides at least itch the scratch of explaining strange behaviors and characteristics of our ancestors and the relics they left behind in a way that approaches Occam's razor.
Everybody agrees he took on an important question, but his answer was not right. I spoke to a Greek classics scholar who said Jaynes's interpretations of the evolution of Greek emotion names was very far off the mark.
The most fundamental problem is that the dates don't line up. Causes and effects are separated by millennia.
It remains a mystery.
A bigger mystery is where the pre-dynastic Egyptians got hold of all those extremely precisely worked, very, very hard stone bowls and jugs. Some are of carborundum! All we know is that they were completely unable to make them themselves. We would be hard-pressed to make those today, using our most advanced fabrication tools.
Likewise the 50+-ton basalt boxes found empty underground at Saqqara, polished to a mirror sheen, optically flat, with interior faces exactly parallel.
I've seen you post things like this multiple times and while I'm not an egyptologist, it's pretty clear that you're getting some details wrong and consistently reaching bad conclusions.
First of all, there was no carborundum in ancient egypt. Silicon carbide was only discovered in the 19th century and doesn't occur in large deposits naturally. I assume you mean corundum, which is most definitely workable with time, patience, and lots of abrasive powder. All of these were part of the Egyptian toolkit.
Secondly, I assume you're referring to the sarcophagi of the Serapeum. They're impressive, but nothing outside the realm of the known tools if given enough time and skill, neither of which they were short on.
Many have made the claim that the known Egyptians had the tools and expertise to do the job. Few have demonstrated convincing evidence of this claim. Very few. The closer experts look, the more questions arise.
Explorer Flinders Petrie spent decades there and was left with a lot of thoughtful questions about how those artifacts might have been made with known methods. Modern engineer Christopher Dunn has the pro and evidentiary background to have raised challenging question about such facile assertions.
Petrie died in the 40s. He hasn't been at the forefront of archaeology for about a century now.
Also, the very first result for me was a UPenn museum article [1] from 1983 demonstrating granite drilling with known tools. Again, hardly breaking new ground here.
If Petrie was right in the '40s, alive, he is still right, dead.
It is one thing to demonstrate crude granite drilling and sawing, and entirely another to actually reproduce observed phenomena. The one is not a substitute for the other.
And you can call them sarcophagi if you like, but that is a box for a corpse, and these have all always been empty. So, boxes. 100-ton boxes, machined to such tight tolerance that they seal just by seating the lid.
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.
>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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
It doesn't quote enough context to even clarify if he recommended damage, or whether he was mocking the people doing the damage.
EDIT: found a larger quotation. From the context, the use of the quote in TFA looks like a misrepresentation of what Augustine said, since it doesn't sound like he was offering an opinion on whether or not it should be done.
He chimes in on the break vs disfigure argument, but doesn't get into the why the nose would have special meaning. That's the part which is so fascinating tbh.
It seems from the article that the noses were broken more than a thousand years before Christ, so I'm not sure a Christian perspective could offer much.
Correct but actually any depiction of any living thing was banned (I know this was true historically) that why you see amazing pattern designs over muslim architecture and not paintings.
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
As a Muslim, I can confirm we only do it because we reject idol worship and the visual depiction of any living being, particularly prophets. We dont believe in any power being present in statues. Just wanted to let you know :)
What are you referring to, when you say "we"? Neither is there "one" islam nor is your specific personal faith identical to what muslims in egypt believed around 700-800 AD. Sure islamism is very dogmatic and has a strong ideal of imperial cohesion (as in: "we vs everyone else"), so that might sound like heresy to you, but not only are there many sects of islam, and there were even more when the majority was illiterate and followed their local teachers, your particular faith is probably very modern and thus devoid of the mysticism and superstition that was omnipresent at that time.
To be clear, yes there are alot of different sects in Islam but in Islam there is one core thing that no matter what, it never changes and that is the Quran (Islam holy book). How its preserved is an entirely different topic but its a book which all Muslims no matter the sect should follow clearly.
Islam sects came to be from different interpretations of certain verses by certain scholars but some verses/core messages are very explicit that there is no question about it, its what would put you under the umbrella of "Islam", some which include idolatry and that its absolutely prohibited and that statues have no power and they wont grant you any blessings nor protection. This is what I was referring to when I say we.
Of course some people will still go out of their way to say no or might very clearly misunderstood or be quite misguided because they were illiterate which would lead to believing many such superstitions but it would be quite a stretch to say thats all Islam where its clearly isnt
You seem to miss my point: i am saying you can't speak for the people conquering egypt in 700AD. You can't describe what they believed, because unlike them you grew up in a culture that eradicated polytheism centuries ago and has only a very abstract idea of what that even means. You can't fathom how people thought in a world where the vast majority of their neighbours burned incenses in front of statues. Yes the hadith calls for violence against such people and their idols, i am not denying that, i am not saying you can't make an educated guess what happened back then, what i am saying is that you should speak for yourself, not for some imaginary "we". Tell me, when you say "we only do it" do you say that you yourself destroyed such statues?
You are right, it was ignorant of me to generalize and phrase it that way. I apologize for this. In hindsight what I was trying to say was: As a current day muslim, what I think based on my core Islamic knowledge & history is that their reason of doing it would be because of said islamic belief which they should have been following specifically since they were converting the churches to mosques.
Very pointed comment. It shows these illiterate people of 700 AD who tried to apply the Quoran rules on idolatry and tried to destroy statues (surely they must have) were no different from the quasi illiterate idle but raging mobs of Portland and Seattle.
IKR? Doesn't make sense anymore. But I was talking about the parent topic, which was the theologically-motivated scratching out of the eyes of figures in mosaic images.
Certainly yes, but its not historic if it was done in their time is it? I mean Islam has been around for 1400 years, this could have been done ages ago when the church was relatively new - also I believe most of those churches were converted to mosques (Muslim prayer place) which would justify some re-configuration for their usage. This is taking into account that this was their land/property, anything else would be going out of line, exceptions could be made of course for how offensive something is.
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 'uglify' a thing of beauty. Those Egyptian statues are representation of people that were in perfect proportions and display idealised geometry.
At a glance, the black ones appear to be made of granite - this is very tough! You might wonder how they were ever able to make such perfect representations with very hard material 3000+ years ago. And to then polish them so well that the polish still looks good after all this time, as on the picture at the top of that article.
However (and whenever) they were made, once made, these are hard and most definitely do NOT break accidentally. Well, not so many of them as that, anyway. If it is granite, I think you could drop a statue like that and it would break your wood or marble floor, rather than break off accidentally.
I've seen my fair share of cracked, chipped, and otherwise broken granite countertops. Granite can definitely break accidentally and dropping a granite statue could certainly break off chunks of it.
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.
300 years is so far off, you are basically implying a worldwide conspiracy
EDIT: i read through other comments by you and you seem to be dangerously deep down a rabid hole of believing society to be hocussed by descartes' demon, throwing around words like propaganda and indoctrination that imply evil intent and planning. There is philosophical insight in cartesian doubt, and that radical constructivism you seem to hold dear, but the path you walk is very dangerous, as it is beset by highwaymen that want to break peoples sanity and hook them on their ideology, cultism or concept of enemies. Please be careful.
Yes - my view is that attacking a statue is, in your mind, very close to attacking a person.
So you are thinking “if this was a real person, how am I going to really ruin their day”, understanding that you are not actually attacking a person. But it sure probably feels more like it than hitting a granite tile.
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 depicted -- which implies they could read it, both when it was a new regime, and when it was grave robbers (who wished to escape retribution in the afterlife).
Early Christians feared these and other pagan statues. They thought it more powerful to break just the nose, or to shave statues of Greek gods they could recognise, rather than decapitate or completely destroy them.
After the Arab conquest, they were mainly seen as just building material, and seated statues tended to be broken off to make cubic pieces for re-use. With no special regard for their identity, nor attempts to erase names. And, aside, it took about 1000 years they say for Islam to become the majority faith, not just the ruling one.
I thought this was the claim of TFA being summarised.
They have examples with walls of text from which I can't guess anything, but whether those are representative of inscriptions on so-damaged statues I don't know.
Answering the question of why the nose is broken on any particular Egyptian statue, relief, or sarcophagus mostly depends on two key factors: the condition of the inscription, and the original location and purpose of the statue. Additional breakage to other parts of the body or to symbols is also informative.
Iconoclasm on a grand scale — such as the destruction of royal imagery following the reign of Hatshepsut and during and after the reign of Akhenaten — was primarily political in motive. Hatshepsut’s reign presented a problem for the legitimacy of Thutmose III’s chosen successor; and Thutmose solved this problem by eliminating a significant portion of the imagistic and inscribed memory of Hatshepsut. Akhenaten’s religious revolution presented a large-scale problem for his successors, who restored the worship of the god Amun; the destruction of Akhenaten’s monuments was therefore thorough and effective.
The condition of an inscription is revealing when it is clear whether the name itself was the primary target of the destruction. Damage to the name strongly suggests that the attack took place during the Pharaonic period when hieroglyphic writing was still understood. The reasons for damage in that period are likely to have been personal animosity toward the one represented in the image or, when a criminal violates a tomb, a desire to evade a deceased person’s revenge.
For the broken nose part - apparently the belief at the time was that the nose of the statue could give life to the spirit of the dead person it represented (by inhaling incense?)
So, by breaking the nose off, tomb robbers 'kill' the statue's ability to bring back the spirit and thus avoid their ire.
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.
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.
Not really. The rival Indic traditions were quick to note slip-ups and wrongdoings by their rivals. For example, the rivalry between the Vaishnavite & Shaivite traditions in South India is well documented. Rival temples and structures would be repurposed frequently, but you do not see the type of desecration mentioned in the earlier comment. Yet you also do have records of the expulsion and genocide of 5000 Jains from the city of Madurai by the Shaivites. The targetting of Buddhist structures and the Bo Tree by Shashanka is well documented by multiple sources. The targeting & execution of the Ajivikas by the young Ashoka is also suggested by multiple sources.
At the same time, these sort of atrocities were very much the exception, not the rule in the long history of Ancient India. I can only speculate that the eclectic nature of the population at large prevented any one group from gaining the upper hand for very long, tempering the ability to target vulnerable groups. Even most dynasties had the preferred religious tradition shifting across generations.
I have always assumed they were defiled according to Muslim strictures on life representations.
Is that falsifiable? We would need someplace Muslim thought held sway but they aren't broken, and places where it never penetrated and they are all broken anyway.
None of that would conclusive in isolation. You would need a lot of data; or records of fatwas issued demanding it.
They were broken centuries before Islam, or even Christianity.
Breaking or disfiguring the nose is a common punishment trope throughout human history. Perhaps this is because the nose is one of the most exposed and accessible organs on the body if one seeks to damage someone mortally, and it is also core to many cultures' concept of beauty and power, so disfiguring it destroys the target in social dimensions also.
Observed the same thing on Hindu idols in Telangana as a child. My dad had a pretty simple guess/answer.
The nose is simply the most common point of impact when you strike a face from up-front(human or idol). A face is probably likely to be the most common target when raiding.
tl;dr: Statue of $person embodies soul of $person in afterlife. "Embodies" literally, as in gives them a body. Hate/fear $person? Suffocate AND insult them by removing nose from statue.
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.
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 skin, then sure, it's the Egyptian sun we're talking about after all.
At least one person in that class must have picked that class for an "easy A", wrote class papers and exams as was required, and thought they got a great deal out of it. Education is a market, you know, you buy a grade and you pay with studying. The less you pay, the better the deal, and everyone loves a good deal.
True, but they had close relationships with ancient Egypt, including various periods of rule by and of Egypt proper, and their cultural artifacts and practices were very heavily Egyptianized, to a point where it's a fine distinction whether something is Nubian or Egyptian, for a period of something like a thousand years
We need to stop having these discussions here. HN users are broadly unequipped to deal with the subject of the "blackness" of Ancient Egyptians. Immediately citing limited genetic studies (as conveyed by a popular newspaper) rather than attempting to understand and sustain reasoned discourse on the sociopolitical dynamics of race is a dead giveaway.
Suffice it to say, the genetic evidence shows that Egyptians (and their southern neighbors) are an indigenous African population, with the current residents of the region generally descendents of the people who were there 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5 thousand years ago. The question of their blackness is a political one - as blackness itself is a social construct of the modern age, predicated on appearance and political necessity rather than strict ancestry, and generally inapplicable to ancient populations. In this case, the continuous and vehement insistence that Egyptians were not "black", over a century and a half of Western scholarship and backed by varying rationales as the years proceeded, is useful as a study in the politics of race and perceived technical and societal capability.
No one gets so up in arms about whether or not the Ancient Greeks were "white" (Super-Alpine white).
Edit: I suppose I asked for it, considering my audience. Thank you for living up to my worst expectations. (Seriously, delete the post.)
I think you are getting downvoted because a) you are asking to shut down a subject that is interesting to people. Talking about stuff is how people get educated. If you have an opinion or something to add, state it. Shutting down a topic because you judge the audience is too narrow to understand it makes... b) you come across as a snotty elitist who has an axe to grind.
I don't see how understanding how ancient people looked is a political study. Yes, race is highly political, but it can be a political and historical topic. Individuals can be interested in what humans used to look like (and this is not limited to blackness) without being interested in the politics.
No one is up in arms. People are just interested. The Ancient Greeks are decidedly caucasian, there is not much discussion around that because most scholars agree.
We make models of what we think prehistoric humans and sapiens looked like and there is much interest in that without it being political. People just like knowing stuff about the past, about their ancestors. Just because some assholes politicize this sort of thing, just because some teachers push their politically charged racial bias on others does not mean that the whole topic is exclusively socio-political.
Citing genetic studies is completely valid. Real science is non-political so I'd say that's a totally rational way to approach the question of what did the people of one of the most sophisticated ancient civilizations look like.
Thank you for taking the time to give your analysis. I disagree with much of it. I ask you to bear with me as I explain myself. The subject of race is inherently political, and, specifically with regards to Egyptians, mired in decades of bad faith. Much of early Egyptology was dedicated to "proving" that Ancient Egyptians weren't "black." This is, of course, impossible; "blackness" is not a objectively-defined designation. It's a contextually-driven decision by observers and the self.
So, again, the most interesting question becomes not of whether or not Egyptians were black - by the modern definition of blackness (itself predicated in part on notions of separating African populations), they weren't, nor where they white, or Middle Eastern, or Levantine. The most interesting question is why the assertion that they weren't black is so vociferous. That's the character of the parent and several of its replies, not clear-eyed curiosity. They represent a conclusion, not an investigation.
It's in this light - in observing this echo chamber - that I felt the need to protest, and I feel justified in doing so. Humor me and assume, for a moment, that "Egyptians were not black," being rooted in a pre-geneology, anthropology-nascent scientific understanding, is itself a political assertion. What does the rest of this discussion look like, then? How, in your default perspective, is it not political? Because of the genetic studies cited? What do those studies actually say, and what about the model you've built around them is actually an intellectual leap?
That's the conversation I want to have. Not, "Oh boy ain't my Negro Studies professor dumb?".
Have you considered that showing up to a thread and saying everyone else is too stupid to understand whatever you’re trying to share, then being surprised that your comment goes over poorly, seems like the real manifestation of ignorance?
In any case, don’t do this here. If you have something to say, be straightforward about it and don’t insult your readers.
Someone got GPT3 to output grievance studies parlance I see. That is to say that this post is identical to the nonsensical gibberish that machines currently output.
I feel like I'm being concise. Blackness is a designation of political expediency. It's not a genetic distinction. HN commenters routinely confuse this point. Ergo, this is a poor topic for us to discuss.
You seem to be hinting at something scandalous; please do be upfront.
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 not a synonym of a true.
This is so weird to me. Some noses are kinda triangular; some are broad and flat... I can't think of a nose shape that even remotely looks like a phallus. Freud had an obsession with phalluses, and saw them in everything. Are eyelashes phallic? Are necks phallic? Is the upper lip phallic? What about chins? I think chins are at least as phallic as noses. Freud was a dang weirdo.
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.
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.
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 surprising that this apparently-scholarly article wouldn't touch upon that.
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.
> Using post-colonial racial stereotypes to interpret Egyptian history is lunacy.
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.
"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 happens... doesn't change history to make that assertion true.
Probably because Europeans either made little worth attributing to aliens OR in cases where they did (Rome, Greece, later cathedrals, etc) lots of contemporary documentation exists today.
In cases where an impressive structure in Europe was created but for which no contemporary documentation survives, aliens are indeed given credit. Stonehenge comes to mind.
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 specifically did not like these noses.
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 has increased slowly over the last 2000 years or so, to maybe 10% today? I don't know whether such DNA tends to represent the elite (as you might expect statues to do) or not.
> 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.
Their conclusion is that "research shows the statues were defaced to deactivate the life form believed to be within them."
Which is to say it hinges on the idea that the statues were not destroyed by racist western colonialists at all, because they found ancient texts mentioning defacement of noses. They don't actually prove anything, the standards of this kind of research are incredibly low.
The problem is that western egyptologist are unlikely to go out of their way to put effort into researching what particular crimes colonialists committed. The victor writes the history books, and they probably didn't even think to write prominently anything about the countless artifacts they destroyed, to them it was all just the work of godless subhumans so why bother.
They have a very good motive to do it, and that today the decedents of the racists will go out of their way to deny it isn't surprising at all.
The whole ancient alien thing comes from a different direction, its whole foundation lies in the disbelief that african people could've ever possibly built the pyramids, even aliens is a more plausible theory to them.
> 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
If I'm recalling correctly, this comes up in Ishmael Reed's novel, Mumbo Jumbo (1972).
Presumably: 1) the damage to statues can be dated - so we know roughly who did it, and 2) some of the damage is specifically targeted (like the article mentions, the left/right hand damage would have meaning to Egyptians, but has far less context to supposed Christian attacks)
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...