Bret Devereaux

Let me explain that a bit. Our statue tradition comes from Egypt, by way of Greece; most of the Egyptian mega-statuary that compares to the statues we are talking about was state art. It was paid for by the state, and the state was the pharaoh. Smaller statues might be....2/22

Meanwhile, the big expensive statues for pharaohs were all about communicating state power. It's legitimacy artwork, designed to confirm in the viewer that the pharaoh is big and powerful and doing a good job. Once again, nailing the facial features was not a big issue 5/22

The thing is, Egyptian religious practice *did* care about remembrance, but they used inscriptions, not statues for that (because the thing that needed to be remembered was the name). This is going to be a theme: you remember with words, you transmit *values* with statues. 6/22

Ok, so the tradition comes to Greece and they make statues mostly...of gods and heroes. When regular people do get statues in a Greek polis, it is explicitly because they have done something that community values and they express some value the community wants. 7/22

ahem, Herodotus 1st historian, Thucydides wrote without attention to sources.