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.
Read more about this topic: Reserve Head
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“There is one great fact, characteristic of this our nineteenth century, a fact which no party dares deny. On the one hand, there have started into life industrial and scientific forces which no epoch of former human history had ever suspected. On the other hand, there exist symptoms of decay, far surpassing the horrors recorded of the latter times of the Roman empire. In our days everything seems pregnant with its contrary.”
—Karl Marx (1818–1883)
“The greatest honor history can bestow is that of peacemaker.”
—Richard M. Nixon (1913–1995)
“Let it suffice that in the light of these two facts, namely, that the mind is One, and that nature is its correlative, history is to be read and written.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)