About that ‘Victorian archaeologists knocked the noses off of Egyptian statues’ thing: this kind of reductionist white/coloniser vs PoC/colonised view of history that a lot of Tumblr espouses really bothers me because it completely ignores the fact that non-European countries can actually have complex and ambiguous histories that don’t easily fit into our received narratives.
Case in point, Egyptians were known to knock off the noses of statues of their dead enemies because that was thought to prevent their spirit from returning to the statue, and the Sphynx of Giza probably lost its nose because of 14th century Islamic iconoclasm.
Totally agree with you, and it’s frustrating as an Egyptologist to see this crap spouted on Tumblr incessantly.
I’d also like to add that early Christian iconoclasm destroyed a lot of Egyptian art too. Particularly at sites like Philae, you see images of the gods hacked out and crosses carved into the walls. For example, two of my own photos from Philae:
The Sphinx may have been partial iconoclasm, and then also 5000 years worth of sand blasting damage. It’s in pretty bad shape, and was almost entirely buried in sand when it was discovered. It was even pretty badly damaged during the New Kingdom, since we have a stele of Thutmosis IV (known at the Dream Stele) in which he states he dreamt of the Sphinx and sought to dig it out and repair it. Ramesses II even undertook projects to dig it out of the sand (since it kept getting buried over the centuries). It was not uncommon for Pharaohs to attempt to repair monuments that were built by their forefathers (think of them like an Ancient English Heritage etc), as it was seen as in keeping with the practice of Ma’at. Some state that it was Napoleon who took the nose off the Sphinx, but with sketches made in 1738 showing the Sphinx with its nose already missing, this theory is debunked as Napoleon wasn’t born until 1769. Suck it haters. It also had a beard, which fell off and wasn’t discovered until the Sphinx was fully excavated between 1925-1936. This appears to have been a later New Kingdom addition to the sculpture though, as the chin shows no sign of hacking damage, and therefore points to an addition which fell off rather than one which was prised off.
But hey, don’t listen to me, Tumblr. It’s not like I have degrees in stuff…
It’s especially irritating because there ARE legit problems with European colonisers studying and using Egyptian history for their own ends and the methods they used. I sometimes wonder if unpleasant people don’t start these kinds of rumours that are easy to discredit to make people sound less credible when they complain about the very real racist/xenophobic biases in historical archaeology. (What research gets funded? Who gets to keep the fancy golden statues? Who gets educated in history so that they can go to dig up and write up stuff and eventually get tenure? Who owns a dead culture, really? There are still people who claim that Ancient Egyptians somehow aren’t the same people as modern Egyptians (which is bullshit, but there you go).)
It’s especially unfair to people who don’t have the time or energy to actually study the subject in depth enough to tell what’s true and what isn’t, and who have to trust what they read on the Internet as a result. So telling lies that can be disproven – not just theories that can’t yet be proven one way or another, stuff that simply is not true because we know what happened from actual contemporary sources – is a super shitty thing to do to people.
And let’s not even get to the world history in school textbooks, and how the story is told there (and which stories are told in school textbooks: Egypt, yes – but what about the kingdom of Kush? Great Zimbabwe? The Indus valley? Mesopotamia? The stuff that was going on in Sahara a bit earlier? The whole of China? South America??? Yes, Egypt definitely is impressive but a lot of it’s due to the HIDDEN TREASURE!!!! aspect, and because there’s a lot of easily accessible information, rather than it being the Only Light of Civilisation in a Dark Age (which it wasn’t).)
(OTOH, the claim about paint on statues being scrubbed off by Victorian historians is at least in some cases true – the reason one cleaner gives himself is that the Elgin marbles were dirty and that he had to scrub some spots hard to get them clean. Now, considering that the Elgin marbles also feature things like horses, chariots etc. that were also scrubbed down to the stone, that at least wasn’t motivated by a desire to make the marbles “whiteface” (although since this story goes around attached to the racist nose-breaking story, it would be a pretty easy assumption to make, wouldn’t it?). But that doesn’t make it UNproblematic. It’s definitely problematic. The cleaners were starting off with the assumption that it was totally OK and cool to go into a foreign country, cut up and essentially steal their historical treasures, damaging them in the process, and then do whatever they wanted to them, despite causing further damage, so that they matched their idea of “nice and clean” things (like good china – or those porcelain figurines; it’s not that Victorians didn’t get the idea of garishly painted statues, it’s that they had no fucking clue about restoration aside from “make things pretty so that you can put them in the parlour”, and tiny flecks of original paint are not “nice and clean”).
So yeah, there is a LOT of fucked-up stuff in the Western study of history, but it’s not always what the tumblr posts claim. And its sucks that you can’t trust these posts to be truthful, because you can’t just tell people to do their own research. Most people do not have time to study the history of Western historical research enough to drawn their own conclusions, or even check the sources (if the post has any).)
But seriously, treat all history posts (including mine, and especially if they sound cool) as suspect and check the sources before reblogging.
EY FATTY BOOM BOOM 