Description
What surprised the archeologists was the highly individual nature of these life-sized depictions, whose individual character has been compared to portrait heads of classic and modern times. 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". In contrast the reserve heads seem to depict unique individuals, with one early researcher ascribing family relationships between the reserve heads he found. With few exceptions they are of high artistic quality, and were very probably the product of the royal workshops.
The majority of the heads were made of a fine, white limestone, while a couple of examples have been found that were made of ground mud from the banks of the Nile. Although there are a few exceptions that are more crudely carved and heavily plastered, most are intricately carved and have been carefully smoothed. The smooth ones have not, however, been polished. They all depict people with shaved heads or close-cropped hair, and the largest examples are just over 30 cm (12 in) in height.
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—Freda Adler (b. 1934)
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—Horace Walpole (1717–1797)
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