That’s one of the reasons for all the missing noses out there! But there are other aspects to consider as well.
For one thing, noses are one of many features that wear off over the years. The Great Sphynx, for example, had a whole lot more damage than just the nose before efforts at restoration began:
Lookit the lil dude on its shoulder!
Most of it was completely submerged in sand and had to be excavated. Who knows how beautifully it may have been carved before it was eroded by all that sand and wind.
Time and weather definitely aren’t the only cause of missing noses, though. A lot of it was done in malice. Thing is, there are a bunch of different reasons people are malicious.
For one thing, ancient Egyptians were pretty heavily into symbology and the afterlife. All these beautiful statues aren’t just idealized or fantastical imagery; they often depicted real people and gods. From what I gather, the person’s… personhood, essence, soul… was there in representative form. Attacking the statue affected that person, and their ability to affect you from the afterlife along with it. A quick way to “kill” them and save yourself from their wrath if you were, say, a grave robber, was to prevent it from breathing. But of course, if you could easily destroy the whole face, like with hieroglyphs, that was even better.
So long before modern white people came to dig up and steal these artifacts, ancient Egyptians were attacking the art of their own culture. And let’s not forget that this was a culture that was around for over a thousand years. It’s hard to even imagine it, but even late Egyptians who are ancient to us had two whole previous civilizations who were already ancient to them!
There was actually an interesting exhibit about this just last year:
https://pulitzerarts.org/exhibition/striking-power/
There’s also this whole thing where Pharaohs really, really wanted to be the most important Pharaoh ever! No one as powerful! Build my statue bigger, my pyramid taller! And if that means defacing the previous guy? Have at it my dude! Shoot, even lesser folks might have someone else’s imagery broken–or even their mummy itself. Not to mention how much mummies and their wrappings were commodified by the modern world and sold by the thousands to be viewed, or made into paint, or ground into “medicinal” powder, or…
Then of course we have the lovely colonizing religion, Christianity, always down to destroy any record of other cultures to promote their own tri/monotheistic creation myth. Can’t have people worshiping “Pagan” imagery, amirite? This has also been practiced by Jews and Muslims and ancient Greeks, etc. But Christians are some of the worst in terms of the sheer volume of their iconoclasm.
Poor Aphrodite here even had a frikkin cross chiseled into her forehead, along with the classic nose removal.
Cutting off the nose was also something that was done to actual people, not just statues. There’s an interesting page about that here:
http://blogs.nottingham.ac.uk/argonautsandemperors/2015/10/23/effaced-the-missing-noses-of-classical-antiquity/
which includes reference to a place in ancient Egypt called Rhinokoloura, where criminals would be banished to, many of whom were disfigured to both punish and mark them. It has also been called Tjaru.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tjaru
Now, none of this is to say that Egyptology doesn’t suffer from immense racism, because holy shit does it ever! People have been trying to suck the colour out of Egypt for decades. There’s a great blog post about it here:
http://kemetexpert.com/race-theory-racism-and-egyptology/
and the rest of the blog is worth checking out too for a perspective that centers Egypt’s Africanness.
I’m by no means an expert on this subject, and I welcome corrections :)
This post touched on something I’ve thought about before, and it inspired a handful of hours of research on my part (I miss being a student and having access to more and better sources!).
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TL;DR: While we are indeed taught a racist perspective of ancient Egypt, the missing noses is not necessarily a major part of that. There are a number of contributing factors in the chronic noselessness we’ve come to know and hate.
snowghoul
kaledo-art
germansingergirl
