What’s the Point of Beheading a Statue?

In 24 BCE, an army led by Queen Amanirenas of Kush invaded Roman territory in Egypt and hacked off the head of a monumental statue of the emperor Augustus. The soldiers brought the head back home, to what is now Sudan, and buried it beneath the staircase leading to a temple of victory. For the next two millennia, everyone entering the temple symbolically humiliated Augustus by treading on his face.
The fate of Augustus’s head is one of countless examples of the deliberate destruction of ar