I learned that the statue had appeared in Canada around 1950, in a collection belonging to some dealers in antique artifacts. No one could account for the name, which associated it with the necropolis of Memphis. The statue, I read, was either a unique example of pre-Dynastic Egyptian art, or a modern fake. I know nothing about Egyptian art, but the style struck me as modern. It wasn’t just the stark contrast between “The Starving of Saqqara,” with its anatomical irregularities, its curious posing, its unhieratic realism, and, on the other hand, the untroubled, suavely-poised and hieratic sculptures I’d seen in the Egyptian wing of the museum. It was the subject matter, above all, that seemed wrong. There were plenty of images of dominated peoples, captives and slaves, but they were always triumphalist caricatures. These figures, as distorted as they were, had too much real humanity, their suffering was too palpable; this was the kind of art 20th century people make, wasn’t it?

Unless this was triumphalistic. I refused to believe it. Weren’t the cruel caricatures of defeated Nubians a kind of denial, meant to defend the Egyptians against charges of a far worse cruelty? Portraying the conquered enemy as a sort of cartoon creature was a way to avoid acknowledging the horrors that had been and were yet still to be meted out in the course of that conquest, or at least that’s what I had assumed. Only a monster would preserve this image of utter abjection in order to gloat over it.

Time and again I returned to the images of the statue. The eyes seem to squint in the sun. The bunched lids are crepey around bleary irises. The skin taut across the cheekbones, the teeth exposed, the withered lips drawn down in a fixed grimace, a harelip-like snarl, the mouth agape almost like a trumpet, strong chin unlike the receding chin of the other, both with overhanging brows and gauntly tall cheekbones. It’s as if one of them were speaking, with that open mouth, the fragment of tongue remaining to it—speaking very matter-of-factly. Perhaps babbling, driven insane. The traces left by the hollows of the nostrils contribute to the impression that the noses were not broken away, but that the image depicts two people who have had their noses sliced off.