The World's Earliest Music. Hermann Smith
yet undesigned confirmation of my views in a work by Dr. A. J. Ellis on the “Musical Scales of Various Nations.” As a result of his extensive investigation, he says “The final conclusion is, that the musical scale is not one, not ‘natural,’ nor even founded necessarily on the laws of the constitution of musical sound, but very diverse, very artificial, very captious.” He has actually, as it were, caught the scale in the act of changing by a caprice at the bidding of the finger. On the lute, in the very early Persian and Arabic scales, the middle finger had nothing to do, and to find employment for the lazy finger, a ligature was, on the neck of the lute, tied half way between two existing notes. One Zalzal, a celebrated lutist, who died eleven centuries ago, tied this ligature half way, and so added two notes to the scale. “These notes,” Dr. Ellis says, “became of great importance in Arab music, and effectually distinguished the older Arabic form from the later Greek.”
For the coherence of the views I express upon this question, it is to be implied that pipes and reeds have had an earlier development at the hands of man than strings had, although the latter furnished the first tangible means by which musical ratios were demonstrated by Greek philosophers. In China the first standards of sounds were pipes, and by them the degrees of the scale were fixed historically, yet too complete to have had their real origin elsewhere than in the land of Myth. There also must be placed the origin of the beautiful little “Sheng” to which the Chinese attribute an unknown antiquity.
The term flutes, it is necessary to remember, is in ancient usage of literature applied to include all pipes blown across and likewise those sounded by means of reeds that the breath sets vibrating.
All the world over men have found delight in fluting, and the flute as an instrument appears to be the common property of the human race. Either of bones of animals or birds, of reeds or alders, of stones or of clay, the art of man has fashioned flutes from the beginning of time’s records.
Seeking to trace man’s earliest musical instruments it will become plain to us that life moves very slowly. How little is really new; variation follows variation. See what a long process thought is. It takes a whole race many centuries to think a new thought, and embody it.
The Greeks as themselves acknowledged were indebted to the Egyptians for their chief instruments. The invention of the flute is attributed to the god Osiris, who lived when the world was young—ages ago; Osiris, the dead god of the blue river, the ancestor of history, the river known to all our race as oldest of rivers. When our thoughts dwell upon “old Nile,” how memory-haunting are the lines in which Leigh Hunt describes it;—read softly,
It flows through old hushed Egypt and its sands
Like some grave thought threading a mighty dream.
CHAPTER III.
In the Land of Egypt. THE LADY MAKET AND HER FLUTES.
The Lady Maket took possession of her latest residence with the appropriate ceremonials befitting a lady of her position; and as she had contemplated frequent excursions from her place of abode, much attention was given to provide her with suitable travelling attire, and also with numerous things requisite for her use; and, in addition, certain personal belongings considered necessary to her comfort—articles of the toilet and other customary aids to the anxieties of woman’s mind—all such were collected by her attendants. Nor did they forget to gather together good supplies of fresh fruit, for there was no knowing the lady’s ultimate destination, except that she would undoubtedly be ferried over the great blue river; and indeed some of the officials, who assumed to have intimate knowledge of their lady’s engagements, gave assurance that she would visit places at very great distances, even so far as the under side of the world. Since the early morning every hour had been filled with the noise of a busy turmoil, and the eager interest of the people only gradually lulled as time went by and there were signs that no further labour was needed on the part of any; every work had been performed, the duties of each had been fulfilled, and then gradually the officials and attendants retired from the presence of the mistress of the house. The lady was at last left in quietness. The long day was suddenly over—the sun went down—and the night had come, and the great silence.
Like all others of her race, the Lady Maket was a fourfold personage. All her notions of herself were of a tetrachordal state of being. Her gold seal impressed with her name testified to all men that she was a being of flesh and blood—really and truly human—and not at all a mystery, unless to be feminine is so; and that she greatly loved her burnished metal mirror, and delighted in the dark glory of her hair, in the coral of her lips, in the flashing light of her eyes, and in the deftness and musical skill of her almond tipped fingers—all that is past question. She believed that, besides the bodily state of her presence, she was possessed of another equally living, although invisible form, a double called Ka, which was as it were a less solid duplicate of her corporeal being; and after the double came the Soul (Bi or Ba), and after the soul came the Khoo or the luminous, a spark from the fire divine. To keep the fourfold-unity of being, to preserve it wholly pure and unblemished, and to secure it against the possibility of separation or dissolution, was to her the most anxious consideration of her life; and this belief gave the essential reason for the assumption that the number four was of all numbers the most sacred, and the idea thereof was ingrained into the daily life of all her people.
Paying a visit to another mansion, I made enquiries for Lady Maket, being much interested in her and her doings; but Mr. F. Petrie, who then in charge, informed me that it is some three thousand years since she was seen, and although I could not see the lady, yet he had many of her belongings which told all that was known of her. I saw the chair—the last, it was believed—upon which she sat, and the wooden head-rest (the substitute for a pillow) by which her dark luxuriant ringlets were preserved from becoming crushed or disordered. I saw the silver scarab rings she wore, the earrings and bead necklaces, the combs and perfume holders, the paint and pomade jars, and the bronze mirror in which she last looked, confessing her delight in her own beauty.
Here also were the flutes, the two slender flutes, that plaintively wailed their music and accompanied her to her last home. Flutes! The very word has magic in it. Egyptian double flutes, and thirty centuries passed them by, and they are here. Adonais—what a find!
For forty years in this wilderness had I been looking for them. Pictures of them by the score I had sought out, had seen them on walls and vases, graven on brass tablets, gems and marbles: yet none seen in real presence. Now in sober earnest they were laid before my eyes, given into my hands, perfect as when they were entombed to accompany that blessed lady to the nether world. Perfect did I say? Yes, but not complete. How fateful fortune does tantalize us—clears up for us one mystery, and leaves another behind. They forgot the reed tongues in packing up for the journey, or perchance they deliberately withheld them. Ah! miserable that I am. Mr. Petrie tells me that he could find none, and he sifted all the dust of that dear lady, and nobody he avers had been there before him—not for three thousand years. Think of it! A rock hewn sepulchre, in eternal night and silence since the days when Miriam sang her song of youth and triumph.
Moreover, to my questionings, Mr. Petrie says that he does not believe that these flutes ever had any reeds to play them, but that they were blown at the end, and so whistled as one whistles a key. Then, to crown me with confusion, up rises another archæological investigator with eyes deeply scrutinizing, and he is certain that they were true lip blown flutes, and that no reed was ever employed. I looked with other eyes, and one glance told me that these pipes originally had reed tongues, reeds of the immemorial kind, and in use to the present day in the arghool. No, by Adonais, surely I cannot be deceived in this. Surely these are the Gingroi, the wailing flutes, associated with funeral ceremonies, slender pipes scarcely bigger than a ripened corn stalk. A fragment of such an one exists in the British Museum, which often excited my curiosity, but was in so delapidated a condition that nothing certain