Why statues have no noses

This is a question that a lot of people have asked. If you have ever visited a museum , you have probably seen ancient sculptures such as the one below—a Greek marble head of the poet Sappho currently held in the Glyptothek in Munich, with a missing nose:. A smashed or missing nose is a common feature on ancient sculptures from all cultures and all time periods of ancient history.

It is by no means a feature that is confined to sculptures of any particular culture or era. Even the nose on the Great Sphinx , which stands on the Giza Plateau in Egypt alongside the great pyramids, is famously missing:. It is true that a few ancient sculptures were indeed deliberately defaced by people at various times for different reasons.

For instance, there is a first-century AD Greek marble head of the goddess Aphrodite that was discovered in the Athenian Agora. This marble head , however, is an exceptional case that is not representative of the majority of ancient sculptures that are missing noses.

For the vast majority of ancient sculptures that are missing noses, the reason for the missing nose has nothing to do with people at all.

Instead, the reason for the missing nose simply has to do with the natural wear that the sculpture has suffered over time. The fact is, ancient sculptures are thousands of years old and they have all undergone considerable natural wear over time. The statues we see in museums today are almost always beaten, battered, and damaged by time and exposure to the elements.

Clearly, they have been targeted — but why? Assuming it was accidental, he decided to delve into the matter more deeply. The result, built on previous research about defacement and the afterlife , is now being presented in an exhibit called "Striking Power: Iconoclasm in Ancient Egypt". It wasn't just the statues that had been attacked either, even 2D reliefs show evidence of deliberate defacement. Bleiberg argues it stems from the fact that the ancient Egyptians genuinely believed icons contained the souls of the deceased or the essence of the diety.

Consequently, statues, reliefs, and other images stood as a kind of portal between the world of the living and the supernatural world of the gods and the dead — a ritual would activate the statue so that it became possessed by the spirit of its likeness.

The majority of the images were kept in the civilization's tombs and temples. In the first, descendants of the deceased could feed their ancestor in the afterlife with gifts sometimes, literally food.

In the latter, mortals could send the gods offerings in return for their guardianship of Egypt. This belief gave these idols power — and the only way to take away that power was through acts of vandalism. And so, without ears, it cannot hear your prayers. Louis that explores how both pharaohs and early Christians vandalized Egyptian statues so that they could "kill" any life force within the representations.

The exhibit, organized in collaboration with the Brooklyn Museum, runs through Aug. Originally published on Live Science. Laura is an editor at Live Science. She edits Life's Little Mysteries and reports on general science, including archaeology and animals. She has won multiple awards from the Society of Professional Journalists and the Washington Newspaper Publishers Association for her reporting at a weekly newspaper near Seattle.

Laura holds a bachelor's degree in English literature and psychology from Washington University in St. Louis and an advanced certificate in science writing from NYU. Live Science.