11. Reproduction of a ‘Reserve Head’ of a Nameless Elite 

In the early 20th c. certain ‘reserve heads’ were interpreted by archaeologists as elite ‘Egyptians’, others as subservient ‘foreigners’ solely based on their appearance and physiognomy. This 3D-printed replica of a Giza ‘reserve head’, for example, was initially interpreted by its excavator, G. Reisner, as the daughter of an Egyptian elite and a slave based on their perceived race. He made a series of nested assumptions: that the head represented someone descended from a different ‘race’ than the supposed ‘Egyptian race’, that they ought to be subservient because they were ‘other’, and that they ought to be female because subservient. While Egyptian society consisted of people with different backgrounds and descents, there is no indication that this head represents someone of ‘foreign’ descent. The variety of the ‘reserve heads’ was certainly intended to capture individuality in an artistic way, but this individuality likely represents the variation seen in populations along the Nile in Egypt and Nubia. In addition, the gender of the heads is not easy to determine. Recent research interprets this head as the representation of a male elite individual. Ancient Egyptian artists were not blind to physical or phenotypic differences. Such traits, as well as hairstyle and costume details, were frequently stereotyped to construct a sense of the supposed ‘otherness’ of some groups of people in official art. However, modern racial concepts are not applicable to ancient societies being a product of later thinking.