Down With This Shit

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…

Anyway.

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.

“Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, S.D. ― Dominique Amiotte, 17, always makes sure to keep a few extra tampons in her locker. It’s not much, but it’s enough to encourage at least some of her struggling friends to come to school when they have their periods.

About half of Amiotte’s girlfriends can’t afford tampons or sanitary pads. As a result, when they menstruate, they’ll skip school for as long as a week. This can lead them to fall behind in class, contributing to the already abysmal graduation rates on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. There are no official records on how many of the young women at the reservation’s 13 schools have felt the consequences of this issue, but individuals we spoke to say it’s an inescapable part of everyday life.

“It makes me angry,” Amiotte told HuffPost unflinchingly while seated in an empty classroom at the Crazy Horse School, where there are 70 girls enrolled in middle or high school classes.”

I was allowed full access to any books, movies, and internet I wanted fully informed about our family beliefs and practices but I was given no supervision once I reached about 13 because my parents trusted me to stick to the rules or not as I felt and come to them if there was anything that I had questions about.

As long as I said where I was going, who I was with, and when I was going to be back and then phone if anything changed I was allowed to do pretty much as I pleased from 13 onward.

I moved back in with my parents after university and the first conversation we had was my dad telling me that if I felt like they were treating me like a child to please tell them because they had no intention of doing so.

password protected my computer so i had to get permission every time i wanted to use it

put a passcode lock on our pantry so we couldn’t eat without permission

regularly checked our internet browsing history

shut off the internet at regular intervals, including when i needed it for university homework

did monthly checks of our bank statements and would confiscate money if they didn’t approve of our activities

in response, i went behind their backs and opened a new bank account, got a secret job, bought my own groceries, and used the wifi from the school across the street. they didn’t succeed in disciplining me. all they did was force me to distance myself from them.