Reserve Head - Possible Functions

Possible Functions

The explanation originally put forward by Ludwig Borchardt, and later expanded upon by other early 20th century Egyptologists including Junker and Reisner, was that the reserve head served as a ritualistic substitute for the real head of the deceased, in case it was damaged. Another suggestion put forward by Egyptologist Nicholas Millet that they served as sculptor's prototypes for making further statues and reliefs of the deceased. Moulds were then taken from the reserve heads in plaster, and the gouges that appear on many of the heads, the seeming mutilation to the ears and the excess plaster that appears on at least one of the heads can be explained as the type of damage that would be expected by trying to remove tight-fitting plaster casts from a reserve head.

Egyptologist Roland Tefnin suggested that the heads were ritually mutilated to prevent them from harming the living. Tefnin proposed that the reserved heads were created by a master sculptor, and upon the subject's death the reserve head received a ritualized mutilation to ensure that it could not harm the deceased in the afterlife. He lists the damage at the back of the head, the removal of the ears, the depiction of the deceased with no hair or very short cropped hair and in some cases the carving of a line in the neck representing ritual decapitation as examples. There are problems with this theory however, in that while there was a well-known practice of cutting certain hieroglyphic figures (such as those representing various animals) in tombs to render them harmess to the deceased, this practice never extended to images of the tomb owner. 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. This type of multilation is not seen in statues placed in later tombs.

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. He proposes that a closer examination of the evidence points to all of the lines being carved onto the reserve heads as being done prior to their completion rather than afterwards. 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. There are other Ancient Egyptian unfinished sculptures where guidelines for the sculptor can be seen, usually painted onto the hard stone. Lacovara believes that paint would have easily rubbed off of the relatively soft limestone that was used, and so the sculptors carved the guidelines instead. These guidelines were then polished away, and in the cases where they were not removed completely were covered by plaster which has since fallen away. Plaster would also have been used to cover up any mistakes that the sculptor had made, such as with the example of heavy plaster seen on one of the reserve heads in Cairo (60003) where the eye has been recarved. The damage seen to the ears of many of the reserve heads is thought to be due mainly to rough handling by tomb robbers. All of this would support the original theory that the reserve heads were designed as alternate places for the soul of the deceased to inhabit.