The World's Earliest Music. Hermann Smith
FLUTES.
The Song of Linus is heard to-day in the land of Egypt; the sacred melody played on the double flutes in ancient days survives without change, but no player on these pipes exists; the song is sung in wailful cadence by lips of another race, for the old race has vanished
in the long corridors of Time.
Strange is the irony of history! The dwellers in the land have forgotten the name of their song, and call it after a Greek myth. Yet, in its origin, it was a very real song of lament, a true outcome of human sorrow, age remembered and treasured in the hearts of the old Egyptian people, and perpetuated by tradition even amongst those who were strangers in the land, who tilled the soil, and lived in the ruins of the past. It was a lament for the king’s son, known as the Song of Maneros, so that grand old interviewer, Herodotus, tells us. He had thought this Song of Linus to be a famous song of Greek origin.
This is what he says:—“I have been struck with many things during my enquiries in Egypt, but with none more than this song, and I cannot conceive from whence it was borrowed, indeed they seem to have had it from time immemorial, and to have known it by the name of Maneros, for they assured me it was so called from the son of their first monarch, who being carried off by an early death, was honoured by the Egyptians with a funeral dirge, and this was the first and only song they used at that early period of their history.”
Plutarch says Maneros was the child who watched Isis as she mourned over the body of Osiris.
Herodotus is constant in admonishing the Greeks that Egypt is the mother of wisdom, and that for a vast deal of the learning and the arts they pride themselves upon they are indebted to her by direct inheritance. What he, a Greek himself, in his day told them we have found true, and in all the light of modern researches the old historian is well supported. We are accustomed to locate Egypt on a few hundred miles on the banks of the Nile, losing sight of the fact that, in the days of her dominion, her power extended far and her influence was felt in all the lands bordering the Mediterranean wherever civilization held sway. Her royal dynasties were a living force for thousands of years.
One startling record was discovered by Professor A. Sayce. He tells us that he has read the graven tablets of Tebel-Amarna (now in the Berlin Museum), which prove to be letters sent from the king or governor of Jerusalem to the Egyptian sovereign, in the century before the Exodus. This governor owed allegiance to the Egyptian monarch, and his letters were dated from “ ‘the city of the mountain of Urusalem, the city of the temple of the god Uras, whose name there is Marru.’ Thus long before the days when Solomon built the temple of Yahveh, the spot on which it stood had been the site of a hallowed sanctuary.”
Along the whole Asiatic coast of the Mediterranean the Egyptians had their military settlements, and consequently there ensued a mingling of many tribes and races. The Greeks, or as they came to be called, the Hellenes, were a composite people with a Pelasgic basis. There was, however, distinct Egyptian colonisation. Cecrops is said to have led a colony from Sais in Egypt and to have founded Athens in 1556 B.C., and Danaus, who seems to be a brother of Amunoph III., is also said to have left Egypt and to have founded Argos, of which he became king, and died, B.C. 1425.
The perpetual trading that was going on between the Phœnicians, Greeks, Italians and Egyptians, brought the land of Tuscia under the influence of Egyptian ideas, and of this the sepulchres of Etruria give ample evidence. The domestic life, the industrial arts, the religious rites, the paintings and sculptures, and even the mode of burial, all are exhibiting new adaptions of older faith and customs; the different development being due to differences in race, soil, and climate, to inheritance and environment. If we look back far enough we shall find that the geography of the country, the outcome of its geology, forecasts the destiny of its inhabitants and writes the history of its peoples.
Of all the variety of vases fashioned by Greeks and Etruscans, the types of the different forms we find existed long before in Egypt, and these vases have been buried in tombs—large underground chambers that are the counterparts of Egyptian tombs—and they have been placed there to please the spirits of the dead, by devoting to them the things that were most loved, most prized, during life. They used the sarcophagus, though they did not mummify or embalm the dead, but laid out the body dressed in its garments, or encased in armour of the period, with strappings of copper and bronze bosses for breastplates, placing it on a stone bier surrounded by its treasures, often of great value, and leaving it to moulder into dust by natural decay. The paintings on the walls of these dwelling rooms of the dead illustrate banquets and scenes of domestic and public life, and afford us most valuable indications of the ways and manners of long past days. A large number of these chambered tombs have been opened, with their treasures untouched since the day of burial. The first that was discovered was by the chance pushing aside and uprooting of a bush by a peasant tending his goats at evening, who, looking through the opening he had made, the setting sun throwing its light into the chamber, was seized with mortal fear at the sight his eyes fell upon; rushing home to his people he described what he saw, the body lying there dressed in the habit as it lived. The next day, however, no body was there, only the figure of it in little heaps of dust, and the metal links and the two round breast bosses fallen, indenting the dust. Those who explored the tomb and recovered its treasures were inclined to the belief that the peasant did see the human form, but that, as in similar cases that are known, it collapsed upon the admission of air and light.
The tombs were rock hewn, or built of stone and then covered with earth appearing as mere tumuli. The chambers many of them being twenty feet by twelve, and superstition asserts that in more than one instance lamps were found still burning with perpetual fire although fifteen or twenty centuries had elapsed since they were lighted.
The painting described in the last chapter, copied from one in a tomb at Corneto (meaning at the necropolis of Tarquinii, the ancient city) shows very clearly that the earliest double flutes possessed by these people were of the Egyptian kind, with a similar form of reed; and this same design I have also found on one or two vases, and also evidently the same style is meant in other instances, in which the details are not worked out, in both paintings and vases. Thus far we trace the connection between Etruria and Egypt as regards the flutes, with Greece as a continuing link.
The people of Etruria were an ancient race, occupying both sides of the Appenines, they are now believed to have been Pelasgian Tyrrhenians, they had great naval power, and in origin were related to the old Egyptian stock, or, as some say, to both Lydian and Lybian. How long they had inhabited the Tuscan land we do not know; they displaced or absorbed an earlier race, as is the custom of invaders. They spread southward as far as the Tiber centuries before Rome was, and founded a city called Tarquinii about 1040 B.C. Etrurian kings ruled at an early time in Rome, probably up to about 500 B.C. The immense cemetery of Tarquinii is all that remains of the ancient city, which is now succeeded by the Corneto city, built close to the old site.
The Etruscans it is judged came about 1200 B.C. They attained renown in bronze work and in pottery (remember here that the Lady Maket flutes date about 1100 B.C.). Historians state that Greeks from Thessaly entered Italy from the Adriatic side and introduced by their influence the higher development of art into Etruscan work. Be that as it may, there is no doubt cast upon the historical record concerning one Demaratus, a merchant of Corinth, who made great wealth by trading with this old city Tarquinii. He migrated 657 B.C. and settled there and married a lady of noble family. His two sons became famous in Roman history. He had views upon Art, and brought with him from Greece two potters and one painter and thus did good service to the land of his adoption.
Another influx of Greeks is recorded. This colony of Greeks came, however, in a peaceful fashion, and settled there, having fled from a plague or famine in their own land, in Lydia.
That the Etruscans constantly went to and fro, visiting the chief cities of Greece, is manifest, since many vases bear official inscriptions that they were prizes won at the Dionysian festivals, and at the Panathenæan games. The knowledge of these facts adds wonderfully to the interest in these vases, and enables us to understand something of the feelings which induced the burial of things that were valued personal belongings, and caused on the walls the paintings to be limned of banquets and races, and wrestling