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.
