For several decades it has been an unsolved mystery among experts and enthusiasts of Ancient Egypt, one of the oldest and most enduring civilizations in the world.
At first glance, it seems normal: the passage of thousands of years makes it inevitable that any monument or artifact will wear out. But why were there so many pristine statues that the only thing missing was the nose?
Maybe because, after all, if something is going to break It is that prominent organ.
However, how was it then explained that works of relief in two dimensions often show the same damage ?
The matter had given rise to assumptions, including a bitter one that continues to be repeated, although it has been refuted: that It was an attempt by the European colonialists to erase the African roots of the ancient Egyptians.
Experts, on the contrary, assure that this theory is unfounded, among other reasons because noses are not the only physical evidence of those origins.
And they agree that, despite the many horrors of imperialism, this is not one of them.
So what could have happened?
Divine powers
The answer with more cre dibility at this time is summed up in one word: iconoclasm, from the Greek Eikonoklasmos , which means “breaking of images” .
We are not talking about the followers of the 8th century current that rejected the cult of sacred images, destroyed them and persecuted those who venerated them.
In this case, the term is used in a broader way to name the social belief in the importance of the destruction of icons and other images or monuments, often for religious or political reasons .
And it makes a lot of sense when you consider that for ancient Egyptians statues They were the point of contact between divine and earthly beings.
The ancient Egyptians believed that images could harbor supernatural power, as Edward Bleiberg, the Brooklyn Museum’s Senior Curator of Egyptian, Classical, and Ancient Middle Eastern art explains.
Bleiberg, who explored the subject driven by the fact that The most common question from museum visitors was “why are their noses broken?”, he explains that the words for “sculpture” and “sculptor” emphasize that the images are alive.
The word for “sculpture” literally means, “something created to live,” while a sculptor is “someone who gives it life.”
objects that represented the human form, in stone, metal, wood, clay or even wax, could be occupied by a god or a human who had passed away and had become a divine being , and thus they could act in the material world .
This is how it is told by Hathor, the goddess of love and fertility, an inscription on the walls of the Dendera temple, probably built by the pharaoh Pepy I (2310 to 2260 BC):
(…) fly down from the sky to enter the Horizon of his soul on Earth, flies towards his body, unites with his form .
In that case, the goddess imbues a three-dimensional figure, but in the same temple there is talk about how Osiris – one of the most important gods of Ancient Egypt – merges with a representation in relief of himself:
Osiris… comes as a spirit… See his mysterious form represented in his place, his figure etched on the wall ; enters his mysterious form, perches on his image .
Once occupied, the images had powers that They could be activated through rituals.
And they could also be deactivated by deliberate damage.
P ero p or what to do
The reasons were many, from the anger and resentment against enemies who wanted to be hurt in this world and the next, until the terror of revenge of the deceased that the grave robbers felt , as well as the desire to rewrite history or the dreams of changing the whole culture .
When Tutankhamun’s father, Akhenaten, who ruled between 1353 – 1336 BC, he wanted the Egyptian religion to revolve around a god, Aten, a solar deity, faced a powerful being: the god Amun.
His weapon It was the destruction of images.
The situation was reversed when Akhenaten died and the Egyptian people resumed traditional worship: the temples and monuments in honor of Aten and the late Pharaoh were those who faced destruction.
But remember that it was not only the gods who could inhabit the images, but also the humans who had died and, after the long and tortuous journey to the Hall of the Double Truth, demonstrated its decency in the Judgment of the soul, becoming divine beings.
Knowing that your ancestors continue to accompany you despite their death can be comforting … but also worrying , particularly if you are someone powerful and it is not convenient for you to be overshadowed by the past.
And power struggles often leave scars.
When Thutmosis III, who ruled 1479 – 1425 BC, he wanted to make sure his son succeeded him.
He tried to erase his predecessor and stepmother Hatshepsut from history, destroying the physical evidence of her existence. And he almost made it.
Anxiety about the future of the past
These examples may give the impression that it only happened in extreme cases, but the destruction of representations of deities or humans was so common that, as documented by Egyptologist Robert K. Ritner, was a constant concern in Ancient Egypt.
Among the numerous texts that express this concern is a royal decree of the First Intermediate Period ( circa 2260 – 1980 BC):
Anyone in all this land who does something harmful or evil to its statues , slabs, chapels, carpentry or monuments found In the precincts of any temple, My Majesty will not allow his property or that of his parents to remain with them, or to join the spirits of the necropolis, or to remain among the living .
The attacks on the graves were equally serious and feared.
A man named Wersu of Copts, who lived during the 18th dynasty (circa 1539 – 1323 BC), recorded a threat that read:
As for anyone who attacks my corpse in the necropolis, remove my statue from my grave, [el dios del Sol] R to will hate it. He will not have water from the altar of [el dios] Osiris, he will never transmit his property to his children .
And the nose?
The mutilations were then intended to restrict power and that could be achieved in different ways.
If you wanted to prevent The humans represented made the much-needed offerings to the gods, you could remove the arm that was commonly used for such a task: the left.
If you preferred that the god did not listen to them , you removed the deity’s ears.
If your intention was to end all communication possibilities, separating the head from the body was a good option.
But perhaps the most effective and expeditious method to make your wishes come true was to remove their nose.
“ The nose e ra the source of breath , the breath of life; the easiest way to kill the inner spirit is to suffocate it by removing its nose, ”explains Bleiberg.
A couple of blows with a hammer and chisel, and problem solved.
The paradox, after all, it is that this compulsion to destroy the images is proof of how important they were to that great civilization.
Remember to what you can receive notifications from BBC Mundo. Download our app and activate them so as not to miss our best content.