Reserve Head - Place Within Ancient Egyptian Art

Place Within Ancient Egyptian Art

While reserve heads were only made for a relative short amount of time, they made an impression on later sculpture of the Old Kingdom.

Unlike other sculptures from Ancient Egypt, these heads were never intended as part of a larger, composite sculpture; they were stand-alone pieces of just the head done in the round, with a flat surface at the base of the neck suggesting that they were intended to stand upright. Most were found in the burial pits outside of the burial chamber of the tomb, but in those cases it is considered likely that they were simply dumped in these places by tomb robbers. Both examples discovered by Hermann Junker in 1914 were found within the tomb chamber, and are thought to have belonged to the owner of the tomb. No evidence of these sculptures have come from the above-ground offering temples, separating them from other Old Kingdom statues directly associated with the funerary cult of the deceased.

The single instance of a reserve head found in an undisturbed tomb was located beside the sarcophagus of the tomb's occupant. It is generally assumed that all reserve heads were originally in similar positions in their respective tombs, though the large number of heads found in burial pits has led to the suggestion that they were instead originally displayed by the entrance of the tomb chamber rather than within the tomb.

The timespan in which reserve heads were created was short; they were likely created by only a couple of generations of sculptors during the reigns of the pharaohs Khufu, Djedefre and Khafre.

The practice of using reserve heads appears to have ended sometime during the Sixth dynasty, replaced by the practice of covering the head or the entire body of the deceased in plaster. These face and body coverings that were created may have the same purpose as the reserve head, working as a substitute location for the spirit if the original head decayed or was otherwise destroyed. 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. The practice of covering the body or face with plaster was also short-lived, as improved mummification techniques offered a better chance of preserving the body than covering it with plaster. Plaster masks that were formed directly around the head of the deceased are now thought to represent an early stage in a process that would lead to the full mummification of non-royal bodies. eventually evolving into the practice of creating masks made of cartonnage, consisting of linen layers mixed with gesso.