Reserve head

Their purpose is not entirely clear; the name comes from the prevalent theory first put forward in 1903 by the German Egyptologist Ludwig Borchardt, that the head was to serve as an alternate home for the spirit of the dead owner should anything happen to its body.

[2] For private works, ancient Egyptian sculptors tended to capture an idealized version of a face, often eliminating individual traits in a way that, as one writer put it: "approached architectural impersonality".

[8] Another common feature has been called the "cranial groove", a careful and deliberate cut that typically starts from the top of the cranium and extends to the back of the neck.

[9] The first reserve head was discovered in 1894, in Dashur, by the Director General of the French Service of Antiquities in Egypt, Jacques de Morgan.

[3] The majority of the heads were discovered by the American Egyptologist George Andrew Reisner, who excavated a number of mastaba tombs to the west of the Great Pyramid of Giza.

[5] The vast majority of the reserve heads discovered came from the cemeteries at Giza, though three examples have been recovered from Abusir, Saqqara and Dahshur.

An example at the Oriental Institute in Chicago was bought from a Cairo art dealer in 1929, and is now thought to be a fake, based in part on the fact that it is made of brown quartzite, a material common to none of the other reserve heads found in situ.

[6] Another suggestion put forward by Egyptologist Nicholas Millet was that they served as sculptors' prototypes for making further statues and reliefs of the deceased.

[14] The function of images of the deceased throughout the history of funerary arts in Ancient Egypt was to act as an alternate receptacles for their soul, and "killing" them would be contrary to this purpose.

[14] The most recent theory proposed by Peter Lacovara as to the purpose of the "mutilations" is that they are guidelines used by the sculptor in the creation of the reserve head.

As proof he points out that in the most complete examples, the mutilations are minor or absent, and on others it is clear that what grooves were made were subsequently smoothed down, rather than being the fresh cut that would be expected if they were inflicted after their creation.

[5] It seems likely that both the practice of crafting reserve heads and that of covering the body or face of an individual with plaster overlapped considerably, with an early example of the latter dated to the end of the Fourth dynasty based on the pottery that was found with it.