CNN News:为什么许多古埃及雕像都没有鼻子?

The northern and southern kingdoms of what nation were unified in 3100 B.C.? India, Egypt, Persia or Japan. Events around the year 3100 B.C. resulted in the unification of ancient Egypt.
One thing you might notice when looking at many statues from ancient Egypt is that they're missing their noses. Of course these artifacts are thousands of years old. Someone might think the noses would be the first things to fall or break off. But a museum curator in New York City was asked the question so many times that he started researching why the noses were missing, and he found out that the faces were defaced on purpose.

The reasons are complicated. Power struggles between rulers. Changes in or disagreements over religion, political division, personal grudges. All of these are likely reasons for the damage, the criminal acts, the vandalism.
But why specifically the noses? The curators suggest that because the nose allows someone to breathe, removing it would make that impossible and effectively kill the statue that represents somebody. There are many other ways including natural ones. These relics decay or become damaged over the millennia and ahead of its opening this year, the Grand Egyptian Museum hired a number of experts to bring artifacts back to nearly original condition.