The World's Earliest Music. Hermann Smith
however made clear the relation though the British Museum possesses but a fragment, and treasures it.
Curious is it not? A nation takes into its care a broken straw, because some human hand in the dim past has fashioned it to use and purpose, and the subtlety of life has not gone out of it yet.
Very precious are these recovered flutes. They tell us of a people’s music, definitely fixed and in use, theirs by choice, by tradition, by religion. They owe their preservation to having been placed within a larger reed, which was doubtless their ordinary case. They were found untouched since that last day. Not from mere sentiment were these flutes placed beside the Egyptian lady in her tomb, but because of a deeply rooted religious belief that these, together with the other articles named, were in some way connected with the daily existence and the comfort and content of the Ka, the double or dream body, which perpetually inhabited the tomb with the embalmed mummy. In point of fact, it was the double of the flutes that was to prove a source of musical solace, not the flutes themselves, for they would not be touched by the dream body. The Egyptians worked out their views with logical consistency, and believed that all things had their doubles, both animate and inanimate. Even a pictorial representation in default of the real thing was of almost equal value for the service to be rendered in the invisible world, and a mere name written had a potency and could secure the coveted benefits to the Ka. For the soul or Bi was often called upon to follow the gods in the heavens, or to undergo probationary journeys to the world of darkness below the earth, and then the Ka was left alone, and occupied itself with the pursuits common to its earthly life. Thus from this strange belief we may presume, or may infer that the Lady Maket was not only a lover of flutes, but might also have held some official position, civil or religious, connected with the use of them.
There is a similar instance in the case of a mummy in the British Museum, where you may see, at the feet of the dead musician, the bronze cymbals he played when alive, with the people dancing around him. Is the dream body—the Ka—still there, I wonder, coming out at night to talk with his fellows? Dream bodies like himself, all terribly old, all listening to the clashing of the ghostly cymbals, and joining in unheard melodies. All terribly old!
These flutes, so slender that a breath might almost blow them away, are undoubtedly of the type pictured in many lands in many ages, and known as double flutes—double in the sense of being paired. I have seen such, though of fuller proportions, represented on Egyptian papyri on walls of tombs and temples of the land of the Nile; and on the brass plates of the palaces of Nineveh and Babylon; carved on the frieze of the Parthenon; painted on Etruscan vases, and on the walls of Pompeii and Herculanæum; and far away on the banks of the Petwa (a tributary of the Ganges), sculptured on the gate of Sanchi Tope. And yet through all these instances never have I found any evidence of the means adapted to produce their sounds; anything that would enable one to form a distinct judgment as to the kind of mouthpiece employed in blowing. The number and the positions of the holes have also been involved in doubt. In some few instances holes are to be found marked, but these might be conventionally depicted, and could not be relied upon as guidance to the scale of notes. Then there are the shams and indications put in by the audacity of restorers, so that altogether the learned or academic knowledge concerning the ancient instruments can hardly be said to have emerged from a state of haziness.
How welcome, then, must be these Egyptian flutes, which at all events furnish sure evidence of the position of the holes, and of a recognized musical scale determined at a very early date in the development of civilisation. The illustration Fig. 5 gives the relative position of the holes and of the lengths of the flutes, which are shown here one sixth of the actual lengths.
| Fig. 5. The Gingroi, or flutes of wailing. |
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Found in Lady Maket’s Tomb. |
All pipes that we call double flutes are represented spreading from the mouth, ʌ shaped, held both of them in the mouth, and played one by the right hand and one by the left. All pipes of the ancients the writers were accustomed to call flutes, not discriminating the differences in types, being in fact unaware of the very important distinctions as in later times perceived by specialists in musical lore to be necessary between lip-blown instruments and reed-blown.
One of these instruments is 17–⅝in. in length, and the other 17–6/8in.; and the bore may be considered as 3/16ths of an inch; but one is a trifle larger than the other, and they are not absolutely cylindrical, being larger at one end than at the other, which is not without significance. Also, it should be noted that being of the nature of corn-stalk, each has a knot 6–⅝in. from one end, and this knot has been bored through to make each a continuous pipe. There are four holes in one pipe, and three holes in the other; they are very daintily cut, and are oval. The pipe with four holes is held by the right hand, and the pipe with three holes by the left hand; for it was the custom in ancient times, and still is in eastern lands, to play the treble notes by means of the fingers of the right hand, and the bass notes with those of the left hand.
When looking at these pipes we should remember that in the day when they were made the feeling for a musical scale was in its infancy; natural science, young indeed, then, had not touched the question of the relation of sounds. In that remote past, the barbaric had its sway, as in the east for the most part it has now; and no idea of harmony, other than that of a consensus of instruments, and a congregation of singers following on traditional methods handed down from generation to generation. Thirty centuries have passed since the calm day when the workers let down the great stone portcullis sliding in its grooves closing the tomb against all of human race, leaving the Lady Maket and her treasures secure in her burial chamber, closed, as they thought, for ever.
At that day Homer was not born, and it would be six centuries before Pythagorus would arrive on this planet, and, destined thereto, turn his steps to the banks of the Nile.
Mr. Wm. Chappell in his “History of Music” writing in 1874, describes the fragment of a pipe which I have referred to, then all that the museum possessed.
“In the Egyptian collection at the British Museum is a small reed pipe of eight inches and three quarters in length. The pipe corresponds so precisely to the description of the Gingras given by Greek writers, as to leave hardly a doubt of its identity. The Gingras has four holes for the fingers. Athenæus says it was employed by the Carians in their wailings, and that their pipes were called Gingroi by the Phœnicians from the lamentations for Adonis, ‘for your Phœnicians call Adonis, Gingras, as Democlides tells us.’ So this Adonis pipe was admittedly of Asiatic origin, and was most likely common to the various nations of Asia as well as of Egypt.”
In the previous chapter I laid emphasis on the conclusion that the fingers were the fates of the musical scale. In these pipes I read the same lesson, and recognize that the scale was due to digital decision. The mystery of numbers pervading the thoughts of the people, and ruling their daily goings, consorted here with convenience of the fingers. The sacred number “four” took the first place, after that the number “three,” and—the union of these producing the number “seven”—the thoughts of numbers moved in an enchanted circle, from which the human race has not yet escaped. We call it superstition to believe in lucky threes and sevens; to these old Egyptians, numbers were a sacred power never to be disregarded. Here, in the four holes of the first pipe we have the primitive tetrachord, planned before the sounds were heard, before the issuing notes had names; and it was this tetrachord that was taken up by the Greeks, and by them moulded into mathematical relations and blended by art into musical form. A similar primitive tetrachord was, I conceive, common to all races of men possessing a musical scale. The second pipe has but three holes; there was room for more—why restricted to three? Who can tell?
It is as easy to have faith in one mystic number as in another; and when we are inclined to believe in the mystical, nature helps us with the utmost readiness.
In using the word “tetrachord” bear in mind that