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Writings
of Runoko Rashidi
Introduction to African Civilizations /
African Presence in Early Asia /
Introduction to the Study of African Classical Civilizations
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Those Missing Noses
in Kemet Ancient Egypt Sculpture
Letter from
Runoko Rashidi Okello
12 May 2010
Dear Family,
I have been asked to comment, to throw in my two
cents' worth, about the seemingly significant amount
of Ancient Egyptian statues with the noses either
missing or badly damaged, and offer some sense of
direction about African-centered research on the
subject. First, I do not think that as a Black
person you can visit Egypt and/or view Ancient
Egyptian statuary and art and not notice it.
I first began to think about the missing noses on
Ancient Egyptian statues more than thirty years ago
and it may have been stimulated from reviewing Dr.
Chancellor Williams' text the
Destruction of Black Civilization. Dr.
Williams suggested that the disproportionate numbers
of Ancient Egyptian statues with missing or badly
damaged noses was the result of foreign occupiers in
Egypt showing their contempt for the African
features of the native builders.
Not content to rest with that, or perhaps looking
for an affirmation of such, I asked a prominent
Egyptologist,
Dr. Rita Freed of the University of Memphis, her
opinion. She told that me that the Kamites (Ancient
Egyptians) believed that the seed of life was
contained in the nose and thus knocking off the
noses on the statues was something done by the
Kamites themselves. Other scholars later told me the
same thing and that a certain set of priests were
indeed responsible for at least some of it. And,
obviously, these are mighty old statues, thousands
of years old, and some of the damage must have been
accidental, through the course of time.
I believe that the missing and badly damaged noses
are the results of all three of these factors and
probably other factors as well that perhaps have not
even been taken into consideration.
As you probably know, I am a traveler—a
world traveler—and
I began to notice over time the sizable amount of
statues with otherwise African features that were
not from Egypt, where the noses were missing or
badly damaged. I noticed it in Cambodia with the
artifacts from ancient Angkor and I noticed it on
some of statues of the African Severan Dynasty in
Rome. So I began to wonder if it was a global thing,
a kind of conspiracy to deface African features on
statues around the world.
So where do we go from here, how do we do research
to find out exactly what happened? I have been
calling for somebody to do this for years, perhaps
as a doctoral dissertation or a master's thesis or
just a group of hardworking people with time on
their hands and looking for a way to make a
significant contribution to the reconstruction of
the history of African people. A note of caution
here, this is serious work and should not be lightly
undertaken.
Now, let me clear, for starters, this is how I think
that it must be done. It is not for the
fainthearted. Tell me what you think:
To begin with, develop a data base. Compile a list
of every available image of a statue or bust or head
or face from Kmt. Then make a count. Then check to
see amount many of the noses are missing or badly
damaged. This includes examining books, photos,
utilizing the Internet, going to the museums and
going to the sites. Make the project as exhaustive
as possible. Do the same thing with art from the
other parts of Africa and the African (Black) world.
Do the same thing with the art of Europe and Asia,
especially with Greek and Roman art. Compare the
results.
That is how I would start. Of course, for many
people this kind of comprehensive and detailed study
sounds crazy. It is a lot of work. But I don't think
that we can get around it if we are really serious.
If that is too daunting for you a smaller, but very
interesting and important, project would be to pin
down exactly what happened to the face of Herumakhet
(The Great Sphinx), once and for all. Review every
source on the subject. Put away "I heard" and "I
feel" and "I believe" and buckle down and do some
real research. Anybody can engage in idle
speculation; I am talking about some real work!
Don't our Ancestors deserve it?
So there you have it. You asked me. And that, I
believe, is what must be done to begin to find out
what happened to the missing and badly damaged noses
on the statues from Ancient Egypt.
In love of Africa,
Runoko Rashidi Okello
www.travelwithrunoko.com
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* * * * *
Another View
Is there an answer to why all
of the Egyptian monuments I see have had the noses
broken off or mutilated.—Thanx, Roy
* * * * *
For one, I am not aware that
"all" Egyptian monuments have their noses mutilated.
I can cite quite a number of examples of
non-damaged sculpture in the round and relief
paintings, but as some of the most well-known
examples of Egyptian art, let's cite the following
as showing no damage:
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The Narmer
Palette—Cairo Museum [engraved
relief] Triad of Mycerinus-Cairo Museum
[sculpture in round]
Statue of
Hatshepsut as Pharaoh - Metropolitan
Museum of Art (New York) [sculpture in
round]
Statue of Ramses
II as Pharaoh, Seated - Museo Egizio,
Turn [sculpture in round]
The Bust of
Nefertiti - Berlin Museum [sculpture
in round]
Colossal Statue of Akhenaton -
Cairo Museum [sculpture in round] |
While it would
depend upon which monument to which you are
referring, the general answer as to the points of
human sculpture may be the most simple: as the nose
is the most prominent projection upon the planes of
the face, movement of, or fall of, a monument in
which the face of the sculpture hits a solid
obstruction (wall, ground, doorway, etc), the most
prominent projection, with little underlying or
surrounding support, is surely going to have some
damage.
Now, if your
question has to do with "deliberate" damage to a
statue or relief painting, then you are asking a
question about the culture of ancient Egypt. In a
number of tombs, sculptures and relief paintings do
show deliberate hacking about the nose, mouth, and
eyes of the subjects.
In almost [all the] cases I can think of, this
reflects damage from tomb robbers, who believed that
to do so would prevent the deceased from haunting
them later for the sacrilege to their tomb and
remains. Egyptian religion and art were closely
connected, and if one "did away" with the
representations of the deceased's nose and mouth to
breathe/consume energy and the eyes to see, then a
person might effect the death of the Ka and Ba of
the deceased which (according to the ancient belief
system) lived on within the tomb for periods and
were revivified/existent in the temporal world for
short periods by their representations.
Andrey O.
Bolskhakov particularly discusses the importance of
the "opening " of the mouth (and by figurative and
literal extension, nose) for life and the eyes (to
read and see objects) as a necessary feature of life
to both the Ka and Ba in his
Man and His Double in Egyptian Ideology of the Old
Kingdom, Aegypten und Alten Testament, Band 17,
Manfred Goerg [ed.], (Harrassowitz: Wiesbaden,
1997), in Chapter 9, "Egyptian Notions of Light and
Sight", §2-6, and §9. He notes the importance of
art representations of an "open" mouth/nose and eyes
as being particularly significant.
For a general
review of the needs of the Ba and Ka in terms of air
to breathe, and sight as conditions of life to these
afterlife entities, see also: "Body and Soul",
Idea Into Image: Essays on Ancient Egyptian Thought,
Erik Hornung, Elizabeth Bredreck, transl. (Timken:
New York, 1992) pp. 167-184.
Finally, if you
are asking about the loss of the nose of the most
famous monument of all, the Sphinx, I can attest
that the act was deliberate and had as it basis a
religious one.
[The historian
abu `Abbas Ahmad ibn `Abdullah ibn `Ali ibn Muhammad
al-Husayni Taqi al-Din al-Maqrizi (died 1442 C.E/845
A.H.), wrote a book called al-Mawa`iz wa al-i` tibar
fi dhikr al-khitat wa al-athar (edited by G. Wien.
Cairo 1913). In vol. 2, page 157 of the Wien
edition, al-Maqrizi clearly states that the face,
including the nose and ears, of the Great Sphinx of
al-Jizah (Giza) was demolished by a sufi from the
khanqah (sufi "monastery") of Sa`id al-Su`ada,
called "Sa'im al-dahr" (meaning "He who perpetually
fasts"; i.e., an extremist), in 1378 C.E./780 A.H.
The reason that
al-Maqrizi cites is that as late as this period,
some Egyptians were still burning milk-thistle (shuka`a)
and safflower (badhaward) at the foot of the Sphinx
and murning a verse 63 times in hope that their
wishes would be fulfilled; the extremist sufi took
it upon himself to destroy the object of their
idolatry. A later (17th century C.E.) tradition says
that a mob killed Sa'im al-dahr and buried him
ignominiously near the Sphinx.]
See also:
Haarmann, Ulrich. 1996. Medieval Muslim
Perceptions of Pharaonic Egypt. In
Ancient Egyptian Literature: History and Forms,
edited by Antonio Loprieno. Probleme der Agyptologie
10, ser. eds. Wolfgang Schenkel and Donald Bruce
Redford. Leiden, New York, Koln: E. J. Brill.
605-627.
[My thanks to
Troy Sagrillo of the University of Toronto for the
above [information and references]. Tom Holmberg, in
writing his FAQ on this topic vis a vis the
oft-repeated folktale that Napoleon's troops had
defaced the Sphinx, also noted:
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European visitors to
Egypt prior to Napoleon's expedition had
already discovered the vandalism to the
Sphinx. In 1546, for example, when
Dr.Pierre Belon explored Egypt, he
visited "the great colossus." "The
Sphinx," writes Leslie Greener in
The Discovery Of Egypt (London:
Cassell, 1966), p.38, by this time "no
longer [had] the stamp of grace and
beauty so admired by Abdel Latif in
1200." Greener goes on to say: "this
exonerates the artillerymen of Napoleon
Bonaparte, who have the popular
reputation of having used the nose of
the Sphinx as a target." The charge
against Napoleon is particularly unjust
because the French general brought with
him a large group of "savants" to
conduct the first scientific study of
Egypt and its antiquities. |
Regards,
Katherine Griffis-Greenberg, Member
American Research Center in Egypt International
Association of Egyptologists
University of Alabama at
Birmingham, Special Studies
Source:
Geocities
posted 12 May 2010
* * * * *
Egypt in the Age of the Pyramids
By Joyce L. Haynes, Rita E.
Freed, and Yvonne J. Markowitz
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On one level, Salvage the Bones is a simple story about a poor black family that’s about to be trashed by one of the most deadly hurricanes in U.S. history. What makes the novel so powerful, though, is the way Ward winds private passions with that menace gathering force out in the Gulf of Mexico. Without a hint of pretension, in the simple lives of these poor people living among chickens and abandoned cars, she evokes the tenacious love and desperation of classical tragedy. The force that pushes back against Katrina’s inexorable winds is the voice of Ward’s narrator, a 14-year-old girl named Esch, the only daughter among four siblings. Precocious, passionate and sensitive, she speaks almost entirely in phrases soaked in her family’s raw land. Everything here is gritty, loamy and alive, as though the very soil were animated. Her brother’s “blood smells like wet hot earth after summer rain. . . . His scalp looks like fresh turned dirt.” Her father’s hands “are like gravel,” while her own hand “slides through his grip like a wet fish,” and a handsome boy’s “muscles jabbered like chickens.” Admittedly, Ward can push so hard on this simile-obsessed style that her paragraphs risk sounding like a compost heap, but this isn’t usually just metaphor for metaphor’s sake. She conveys something fundamental about Esch’s fluid state of mind: her figurative sense of the world in which all things correspond and connect. She and her brothers live in a ramshackle house steeped in grief since their mother died giving birth to her last child. . . . What remains, what’s salvaged, is something indomitable in these tough siblings, the strength of their love, the permanence of their devotion.—WashingtonPost |
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By Frank B. Wilderson, III
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writer and filmmaker from
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as one of only two black
Americans in the African
National Congress (ANC).
After marrying a South
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Wilderson's stinging
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Wilderson has a distinct, powerful voice and a strong
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the indignities of
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early years in Minneapolis .
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Weekly
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The White Masters of the
World
From
The World and Africa, 1965
By W. E. B. Du Bois
W. E. B. Du Bois’
Arraignment and Indictment of White Civilization
(Fletcher)
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