On a Pair of Ancient Egyptian Double-Flutes

In the spring of the present year I received a letter from Mr. Flinders Petrie, who was then in Egypt, telling me of a great find he had come across while excavating in the Fayoum. The letter was partly in answer to one I had written him, begging him to look out for any traces of a musical notation that might possibly have been employed by the ancient Egyptians. I was then engaged in a study of the rise and history of the notation of music. I thought that in Egypt—the mother of civilisation, that wonderful land which has done so much in the way of discovery and development of the arts and sciences—it was quite possible that the art of writing down sounds sung by the voice, or given forth by instruments of music, might have originated; and that the Greeks might have borrowed the idea, as they borrowed and adopted so much, so very many of the arts and customs of this most ancient people. Mr. Flinders Petrie told me that as yet a method of music notation had never been looked for, but that he would keep his eyes open, and should not be surprised, now that its possibility had been suggested, if some such system were to be found in the papyri dealing with religious services, or on the wall-paintings of tombs, where distinguished musicians were buried. And he went on to say he had found in the coffin of a mummy, buried more than 3,000 years ago, a case containing a pair of double-flutes, still in perfect condition, despite the ages and ages that had elapsed since they were buried with their long dead owner. He told me one of these pipes possessed four finger holes, the other three, and he gave me the dimensions of the tubes; roughly each are about eighteen inches long and three-sixteenths of an inch diameter, and he furnished me with the distance of the holes from one another. The singularly small size of the bore surprised me, and I opined that Mr. Petrie had erred in these measurements, for I felt that such slender tubes as these would not have spoken as flutes. The importance of the discovery was very great from a musical point of view; indeed, its significance can hardly be overrated, for I saw that these pipes would most likely supply what had been a matter of speculation for ages past, and is still a mystery—viz., the notes or exact sounds of the old Egyptian scale. I will not detain you by recounting the many guesses by historians and investigators as to how this ladder of sounds was built up, and what was the musical system the Egyptians employed. It is enough to state that it has been generally assumed to resemble the mode now in use in Egypt, a country where very little change occurs; and where they employ a system of quarter tones, third of a tone, and such minute intervals as are used by the Arabs, Persians, Hindoos, and other Eastern people, a system we, with our Western trained ears, cannot appreciate, and which we somewhat hastily (I venture to think) conclude can be nothing more than a fortuitous collection of intervals, possibly fit for a melodic purpose, but one impossible to deal with, so far as harmonic combinations are concerned. The late Carl Engel, in his valuable work “The Music of the most Ancient Nations,” argued with much ingenuity that the Egyptians, in common with the Assyrians and the Hebrews, used the Pentatonic scale—that is to say, our modern diatonic scale less the fourth and the seventh. In this scale there are no semitones, and of course no chromatic intervals are employed. Some few writers have hazarded a guess that Pythagoras obtained the idea of his so-called tetrachordal system from the Egyptians, and thus the music of the Greeks came from an African source. Remembering all this, I was naturally anxious to see these precious flutes so wonderfully preserved, and impatiently waited for the time when Mr. Petrie would bring the results of bis excavation labours to London. I do not propose to speak to you on the music of the ancient Egyptians. The subject is a fascinating one, but I must not stay to describe their various instruments of the string, wind, and percussion types—there are as many as seventeen different kinds of these known to have been employed; nor will I dilate on their music itself, or on their performances. Those who have given any attention, or studied all this, cannot but feel that the music of the Egyptians must have been of a higher and more complete kind than that which obtained among the Greeks, even in their palmiest days. The Greek writers indulge in much hyperbole as to the wonderful effects of their music; the papyri of the Egyptians are silent in this respect. But better than such descriptions, fanciful or real, the Egyptian artists made use of their brushes to such good effect, that in the frescoes which adorn their sumptuous tombs we have pictured for our instruction the daily life of this people, their arts and customs, as they existed two, three, four, and five thousand years ago. These monuments speak a language that cannot be misunderstood : together with their papyri they tell us enough to perceive that a high degree of civilisation and culture existed on the banks of the Nile, when the inhabitants of this island were—well, probably cannibals. So far as music is concerned, we have plenty of evidence proving that the ancient Egyptians were highly susceptible to the art. They employed it to increase the mysteries of their religious worship, to endow their warriors with courage, to minister to the delights of their social entertainments, to enhance the rhythmical effects of their dances, and to please the people in their ceremonies, festivities, official celebrations, and public processions.