 Their purpose is not entirely clear; the name comes from the prevalent theory first put forward, in 1903, by the German Egyptologist Ludwig Borchardt that the head was to serve as an alternate home for the spirit of the dead owner should anything happen to its body.What surprised the archeologists was the highly individual nature of these life-sized depictions, whose individual character has been compared to portrait heads of classic and modern times.For private works, Ancient Egyptian sculptors tended to capture an idealized version of a face, often eliminating individual traits in a way that, as one writer put it