[Since the foregoing paragraphs have been put into print a preliminary report has come to hand from Professor Reisner, to whom I am indebted for most of my information regarding these portrait heads—_Museum of Fine Arts Bulletin_, Boston, April, 1915.]
At a somewhat later period in the Old Kingdom the making of these so-called “substitution-heads” was discontinued, and it became the practice to make a statue of the whole man (of woman), which was placed above-ground in the megalithic _serdab_ within the _mastaba_ (see =94=). But even when the complete statue was made for the _serdab_ the head alone was the part that was modelled with any approach to realism. In other words, the importance of the head as the chief means of identification was still recognised. Moreover, this idea manifested itself throughout the whole history of Egyptian mummification, for as late as the first century of the Christian era a portrait of the deceased was placed in front of the face of the mummy.
Thus in course of time the original idea of converting the wrapped body itself into a portrait-statue of the deceased was temporarily[8] abandoned and the mummy was stowed away in the burial chamber at the bottom of a deep shaft, the better to protect it from desecration, while the portrait-statue was placed above ground, in a strong chamber (_serdab_), hidden in the _mastaba_ (=94=).
A certain magical value soon came to be attached to the statue in the _serdab_. It provided the body in which the _ka_ could become reincarnated, and the deceased, thus reconstituted by magical means, could pass through the small hole in the _serdab_ to enter the chapel of offerings and enjoy the food and the society of his friends there.
Dr. Alan Gardiner has kindly given me the following note in reference to this matter: “That statues in Egypt were meant to be efficient animate substitutes for the person or creature they portrayed has not been sufficiently emphasised hitherto. Over every statue or image were performed the rites of ‘opening the mouth’—magical passes made with a kind of metal chisel in front of the mouth. Besides the _up-ro_ ‘mouth opening,’ other words testify to the prevalence of the same idea; the word for ‘to fashion’ a statue (_ms_) is to all appearances identical with _ms_ ‘to give birth,’ and the term for the sculptor was _saʿnkh_, ‘he who causes to live.’”