许多埃及雕像的鼻子都破坏了

The most common question that curator Edward Bleiberg fields from visitors to the Brooklyn Museum's Egyptian art galleries is a straightforward but salient one: Why are the statues' noses broken?

布鲁克林博物馆埃及艺术画廊的馆长爱德华·布莱伯格·菲尔兹向参观者提出的一个最常见的问题是:为什么雕像的鼻子被打断了?

Bleiberg, who oversees the museum's extensive holdings of Egyptian, Classical and ancient Near Eastern art, was surprised the first few times he heard this question. He had taken for granted that the sculptures were damaged; his training in Egyptology encouraged visualizing how a statue would look if it were still intact.

布莱伯格负责管理博物馆的大量藏品，包括埃及、古典和古代近东艺术品，他最初几次听到这个问题时感到很惊讶。他对雕塑已经损坏这件事;他在埃及学的训练鼓励人们想象如果一尊雕像仍然完好无损的话会是什么样子。

It might seem inevitable that after thousands of years, an ancient artifact would show wear and tear. But this simple observation led Bleiberg to uncover a widespread pattern of deliberate destruction, which pointed to a complex set of reasons why most works of Egyptian art came to be defaced in the first place.

几千年后，一件古老的工艺品磨损似乎是不可避免的。但这一简单的观察让布莱伯格发现了一种普遍的蓄意破坏的模式，他指出了一组复杂的原因，为什么大多数埃及艺术品一开始就遭到破坏。

A selection of objects from the Brooklyn Museum's collection will travel to the Pulitzer Arts Foundation later this month under the co-direction of the latter's associate curator, Stephanie Weissberg. Pairing damaged statues and reliefs dating from the 25th century BC to the 1st century AD with intact counterparts, the show testifies to ancient Egyptian artifacts' political and religious functions -- and the entrenched culture of iconoclasm that led to their mutilation.

本月晚些时候，在普利策艺术基金会副馆长斯蒂芬妮·韦斯伯格(Stephanie Weissberg)的共同指导下，布鲁克林博物馆藏品的一部分将被送往普利策艺术基金会。此次展览将公元前25世纪至公元1世纪的受损雕像和浮雕与完好无损的文物进行比对，证明了古埃及文物的政治和宗教功能，以及导致这些文物残缺不全的根深蒂固的反偶像文化。

In our own era of reckoning with national monuments and other public displays of art, "Striking Power" adds a germane dimension to our understanding of one of the world's oldest and longest-lasting civilizations. This stylistic continuity reflects -- and directly contributed to -- the empire's long stretches of stability. But invasions by outside forces, power struggles between dynastic rulers and other periods of upheaval left their scars.

在我们这个对国家纪念碑和其他公共艺术展览进行反思的时代，《惊人的力量》为我们对世界上最古老、最持久的文明之一的理解增加了一个密切相关的维度。这种连续性的风格反映了——也直接促成了——帝国的长期稳定。但外部势力的入侵、王朝统治者之间的权力斗争和其他动荡时期留下了他们的伤疤。

"The consistency of the patterns where damage is found in sculpture suggests that it's purposeful," Bleiberg said, citing myriad political, religious, personal and criminal motivations for acts of vandalism. Discerning the difference between accidental damage and deliberate vandalism came down to recognizing such patterns. A protruding nose on a three-dimensional statue is easily broken, he conceded, but the plot thickens when flat reliefs also sport smashed noses.

“在雕塑中发现的破坏模式的一致性表明，它是有目的的，”布莱伯格说，他列举了破坏行为的无数政治、宗教、个人和犯罪动机。辨别意外伤害和故意破坏的区别归结于识别这种模式。他承认，立体雕像上突出的鼻子很容易被打破，但当扁平浮雕上的鼻子也被砸碎时，情节就变得复杂起来。

The ancient Egyptians, it's important to note, ascribed important powers to images of the human form. They believed that the essence of a deity could inhabit an image of that deity, or part of that deceased human being's soul could inhabit a statue inscribed for that particular person.

值得注意的是，古埃及人把重要的权力赋予了人类形体的形象。他们相信，神的本质可以存在于那个神的形象中，或者，那个死去的人的灵魂的一部分可以存在于为那个特定的人雕刻的雕像中。