Egyptologist Roland Tefnin suggested that the heads were ritually mutilated to prevent them from harming the living. Tefnin proposed that the reserved heads were created by a master sculptor, and upon the subject's death the reserve head received a ritualized mutilation to ensure that it could not harm the deceased in the afterlife. He lists the damage at the back of the head, the removal of the ears, the depiction of the deceased with no hair or very short cropped hair and in some cases the carving of a line in the neck representing ritual decapitation as examples. There are problems with this theory however, in that while there was a well-known practice of cutting certain hieroglyphic figures (such as those representing various animals) in tombs to render them harmless to the deceased, this practice never extended to images of the tomb owner. The function of images of the deceased throughout the history of funerary arts in Ancient Egypt was to act as an alternate receptacles for their soul, and "killing" them would be contrary to this purpose. This type of mutilation is not seen in statues placed in later tombs.