History
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. 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. He identified these mastabas as belonging to royal family members of the pharaoh Khafra, one of which (No. 4140) was identified as that of a princess based on a stela inscription that was found. Two additional examples were discovered by the Austrian Egyptologist Hermann Junker at Giza during 1914. 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.
Modern forgeries of reserve heads are known to exist. 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.
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—Caresse Crosby (1892–1970)
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“History ... is, indeed, little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind.
But what experience and history teach is this—that peoples and governments have never learned anything from history, or acted on principles deduced from it.”
—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)