The stone pictures shew these vessels at their departure and return, with variety of details of loading and cargo, etc. On the mast of one of the ships a three string lyre or bow-harp is slung. In the description of one of these vivid pictures, are these words, written as the Queen Hatasu ordered, and probably taken from her own lips as what she wished to be set forth

The vessels went from the Nile by an ancient water-way, partly canal, into the Red Sea, and it would seem that we are to understand (for much of the whole inscription has broken away) that for some special cause they were diverted and went first across the sea to the coast of Arabia, a proceeding doubtless of some temerity, but that happily they escaped danger, and went on to their original destination, and brought thence the myrrh and the actual trees of Ana-sycamore, the coveted odoriferous trees, the chief object of the voyage being to secure the costly incense for the service of the white Temple built by the Queen. It seems to me that Queen Hatasu’s words “the Divine Land” point to her belief that there in Arabia, and beyond, to that far eastern horizon where the white mountains meet the blue heavens, there, was the true home of the Gods, the earlier home whence came her race. Maybe she cherished the names of Anu and Ishtar, and knew that these old deities of Chaldæa were those she worshipped under Egyptian names.

The common course of newer nations is thus, to take and to rename the old gods. Herodotus considers that the names of nearly all the gods of Greece are derived from Egypt. To each of the ancient nations it would seem that the old solar myth was newly told in parable, the esoteric meaning of it known only to their priests.

That wonderful piece of wall sculpture may be seen to-day; time and the tourist have destroyed some portions, yet enough endures to tell the story which the great Queen left there three thousand four hundred years ago. Just as it was in the old Chaldæan temples, the sanctuary, “the Holy of Holies,” is cut in the rock itself, far within, there light was not needed, “for the gods see everywhere.” This beautiful white temple rises in three terraces cut out of the limestone cliff, and once had an avenue of sphinxes three miles long, leading down to the blue river.

Looking at the plan of the Temple one sees that the thought of it was Chaldæan, it is so like the terrace temple of the God Bel by the Euphrates, and I cannot but think that the three-string lyre hung on the mast of the ship she sent to “the coast of Arabia” had a meaning to her own heart, was a simple token that would be understood by all of her royal race, to show by this symbol that the lyre originally came from that “divine land” whither her thoughts went, as a child turns to its mother.

Fig. 1. The same Lyre as pictured slung on the mast of Queen Hatasu’s ship.

CHAPTER II.

In the Land of Myth.

THE PURSUIT OF THE GODS.

IN the land of Myth there occur many landmarks that project their shadows into dim distances, telling with no uncertain indications that the land of Fact is a much more extensive region, that it environs both the land of myth and the land of tradition that borders it, and yields to the explorer many evidences much earlier in racial history, when as yet the mind of man had not imagined

“the fair humanities of old religion.”

In the pursuit of the gods we have to look back far beyond the age whence the gods emerged. Like the rivers that come to our feet at full flood so are these very human gods, they represent men in the fulness of power, and disclose not the long course, the broad expanse of time, the toilsome difficulties, through which that power has been attained.

The Greeks attributed to Apollo the invention of the lyre, the eight-stringed lyre a completed and perfect instrument of music. In the British Museum there is a magnificent marble statue of Apollo, and in his hand the sculptor has fashioned a lyre of noblest pattern, such as his fellow worshippers believed the god had designed and given to them. We, of later days, well know that so accurate a leap to perfection does not accord with human experience, and moreover are able to trace the stages by which in the course of centuries the lyre had arrived at that complete condition. So by the help of the Greeks themselves, by their literary records, by their representations in sculpture and in paintings, I hope that we shall be able to recognise the process by which men worked in their own day of life from generation to generation for the accomplishment of their aims in the art and pleasure of music.

The great god Pan, beloved of the Greeks, and more widely worshipped to-day under another name, gave men the little river reed to make their music with, and marvellously has the gift flourished; the simple tiny pipe, growing with the growth of centuries, has become a pipe speaking with the voice of Jove, has reared itself upward until its heighth would make it fit to stand beside the hand of the great Phidian statue of the Olympian god. Simple as a Pan’s pipe is the great diapason that reaches upward to the vaulted roofs of our temples. Not more impossible to the mind of the ancient Greek the conception of the thing of music we call an organ, than is to us the realization of the faith in those divinities of mountains, woods, and streams, of those early dwellers in a green world. Yet how we linger over the legends of the past, and almost wish we could believe they once were true. Alas, in our well worn world, fancy is a poor exchange for faith. The legend of Pan reads how a nymph, Syrinx by name, whom Pan was pursuing, prayed the Naiades (the nymphs of the water) to change her into a bundle of reeds, just as Pan was laying hold of her, who therefore caught the reeds in his hands instead of the desired nymph. The winds moving these reeds to and fro caused mournful but musical sounds, which Pan perceiving he cut them down, and made of them the pipes first known as the Syrinx, and afterwards called by his name,—

The Pan’s pipes as a musical instrument made its mark in history; in almost every land in some form or other it has existed as a popular instrument, and therefore a source of pleasure. Varied in form, and with pipes few or many, it is found on ancient sculptures and in paintings. Europe, Asia, Africa, and America show specimens of the instrument ancient, and often modern; for the use survives among some people not yet spoilt by premature civilization. The British Museum possesses a very peculiar specimen made of stone, which was found in Central America. Another, of which there is a cast in the Berlin Museum, was discovered placed over a corpse in a Peruvian tomb; it was made of a greenish stone, a kind of talc, and had eight pipes which gave their notes as in ancient days.

The British Museum possesses an interesting relic from a tomb at Arica; this Peruvian huaraya puhura consists of fourteen reed pipes of a brownish colour tied together in two rows, so as to form a double set of seven reeds; both sets are of the same dimensions and are placed side by side, one set being open at the bottom, and the other set being closed, consequently capable of producing octaves to the open set; a remarkable feature therefore is the presence of the open set, indicating a clear perception of the musical relations of the two distinct forms used.

The Chinese also have their example in the instrument they call “The Outspread Phœnix” or the sacred bird, to them the outward symbol of some myth that had credence from immemorial times.

Whether there has been a migration of races and heritage of primitive invention, or whether with each people the Pan’s pipes had spontaneously originated, is a problem upon which curiosity cannot fail to be awakened when it is noticed how these instruments, almost identical in make and shape, are found all over the world (see forward “In the Land of China.”)

The Chinese instrument is an assemblage of pipes of various lengths from which musical tones of different pitches are produced,—it is a mouth organ. Our modern organ is likewise an assemblage of pipes, and differs only from it in respect of number and degree. Perhaps the blowing across the open end of a pipes was the earliest mechanical way of producing a flute sound. The little river reed pipe of Pan is therefore selected as the type of all flutes; the principle is the same whatever the variation in method of sounding.

Yet the appearance of Pan marks only one stage in the land of myth, and that only just within the confines near where the border lines of myth and history meet. For many thousand years beyond this the imagination must travel to reach the earliest sources of music. The complete set of seven pipes claimed by Pan was not the work of a summer’s day, the scale as seven sounds was not the witchery of a nymph’s voice happily remembered by a forest God; no, we may be sure the course of life was more prosaic than that, and the seven-toned instrument had, as a seven branched river, its beginning from one,—one pipe, ages, it may be, earlier than the seven.

What do I make of it? Clearly this,—man IS a measuring animal. Like other animals he calculates, forecasts and provides, but he alone possesses the measuring faculty. Rambling again and again through the region of the past, the thought presses forward for recognition that man is a measuring animal, and hence his ability to produce instruments of music. In the beginning they were all founded upon measure, the rude measure of what suited the fingers; and the habit of so marking off spaces, as time went on, recorded itself in a system, at first simple as a child’s wit could compass, and afterwards so growing in complexity as to tax the ingenuity of the most active brains of full-grown civilized men to master and utilize, and yet at the last nothing more than a system of finger activity for the covering of holes and the touching of strings. Thus your musical scales arose. Had Polyphemus had the ordering of a musical scale, most surely the intervals would have been considerably larger; he would have suited his own fingers whether with lengths of strings or with holes in pipes.

Imagine yourself a prehistoric man. How would you set about whistling? The lips are in the control of the imitative faculty; the effect called whistling would naturally be first elicited by accident of emotion, or sensibility of one kind or other. The intent to whistle would arise in desire to imitate; a chance whistle heard from a shell or hollow nut or reed would attract attention as for imitation. To imitate, is, as we know, a propensity of monkeydom. How the human animal shares this propensity as a characteristic of his race, and how society is based most differentially upon it,—is not that also taught and recognized in philosophy?

Beyond the faculty of imitation man possesses that of measuring; he measures and apportions in his buildings and his bakings: inches and acres bear relation to each other; he marks off spans and cubits and inches, and apportions minutely by millet-seeds and barley-corns. For in earliest times simplest means and methods were as arbitrary as are now our elaborated mechanisms. It is a truism that music is ruled by measure, but what I want you to perceive is quite a different interpretation, and that is that it was the measuring that ordered the music.

Those who, seeing the holes that are cut upon a common flute, or oboe, consider that in the origin of the instrument they were so done in order fitly to comport with a musical scale, are wrong in their supposition.

In the primitive making of a flute the holes were cut to suit the spread of the fingers, and the scales which followed as the result of the placing the holes, were accepted by primitive man; the ear got to like the sequence of sounds, and it so worked into the brain of the race, that ages after, it became an intellectually accepted musical scale, or relation of notes and was varied by evolution; the structure of the organ of hearing is the same in every race, so far as we can ascertain, and the same natural laws are obeyed in its exercise. Different races, however, have developed the hearing ear differently as to its choice, because primitively, in the setting out of their instruments there were differences of relation. The lengths of the strings, and the distances of the holes spaced for the convenience of the fingers, ordained the musical scales. Contrast the music of the European and the Asiatic races. Our so-called divine music is to the Chinese miserable, unscientific stuff; and the sounds which please Asiatics as entrancing music, are to us distracting din, positively painful to listen to. The liking of the ear in music is a liking by inheritance, transmitted as a facial type is.

The fingers are the fates of the musical art. Curiously enough, six fingers have been the chief arbiters of the nature of man’s music; and yet how long it was before that number was brought into use. Earliest pipe instruments seem to have employed only two fingers; then the thumb was made available, after that the third finger, and at last the little finger was brought into service; it was, however, the period of the ruling of the six fingers, three of each hand, in which the scales were laid, and the art of music developed. In the stringed instruments there is evidence of similar advance from one string to many. Men learnt slowly the marvellous capacities of the lissome fingers they possess.

We should see a meaning and a purpose in each change and variation in the shape and adaptation of instruments. It may strike you somewhat strangely that you should be set thinking of bits of wood, and pipes and strings, as being aforetime the actual music makers, moulding in fixed forms our musical tendencies. You fancy they are our servants, unaware that they have ruled us earlier than we have ruled them.

My conclusion, curious as it may seem, is put forth seriously, after much study and after long inquisitive looking into things, possibly worth thinking about. Very lately I found a pertinent 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,

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 could be made of it. The discovery of this pair of flutes 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.

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 17-5/8in. 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 6-5/8in. 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 the meaning is a series of four notes in an order of succession, and not the union of notes as a compound sound or “chord.”

Pipes with but two holes are common in pastoral use now, and in early times doubtless preceded those with three and four holes; and, however slow the changes, progress could not be absent. In Lady Maket’s pipes we see evidence of a great change, a tetrachord with an added tone, and this supplied by another pipe. Who can tell how many centuries of civilization such progress indicates?

An interesting speculation centres upon the means by which the sounds were produced. Were the pipes lip blown at one end, or reed blown; and, if the latter, by what reed? One of the hautboy kind, or one of the clarionet type such as the arghool? The first is called a double, and the other a single reed. Fig. 6 is an illustration of the arghool reed, full size, as used at this day in the arghool; it is called a beating reed; the reed tongue is made by cutting a slip at the side and lifting it a little, and, as it is bound by string at one end, the tip tilts, allowing passage for the wind through the aperture that the cutting has left beneath, upon the edges of which it beats in vibrating.

Fig. 7 shews a full size reed of the hautboy type, and above it, as looking down upon the tip of the reed, is seen the oval form it assumes after it has been moistened for playing. The two parallel lines indicate its appearance when dry. The make up of the reed is modern, but the size is of the old pattern as used by Italian peasants to the present day, spoken of as the pastoral hautboy.

Some readers not familiar with the instrument will be glad of this illustration showing the difference between double and single reeds. In the double reed, which consists of two slips of reed bound together, the vibrations take place only at the tips, and are caused by rapid changes from oval to parallel due to suction by the current of air driven down between them. It should be understood that in both the single reed and the double reed the action is the same in kind, and the vibrations or sounds result from the stream of air being checked in its progress by closure of the aperture by force of suction alternating with opening of the same by the resilient power or spring in the form and material of the reed—in other words vibration is due to shocks of arrested motion in extremely rapid recurrence—the number of repetitions of arrest per second constituting what we call the pitch of the notes or sounds.

Using either the hautboy reed, or the arghool reed, with these flutes, a scale of notes of some sort may be elicited. The narrowness of the bore causes so much difficulty in the obtaining consecutive notes by lip blowing, that I the least favour the supposition that the pipes were designed for such a method. The hautboy reed is almost always associated with a conical pipe; but there are instances, in which it is used in connection with a cylinder of diameter quite as small as that of these pipes. We have no intimations that the Egyptians of that period (1100 B.C.) were familiar with the hautboy reed.

In any experiments with the hautboy reed the management of the reed by the muscles of the lips should be prohibited, as being a practice unknown to the ancients. My definite conclusions are that these pipes are true specimens of the di-aulos at its earliest stage; that the slimness betokens a particular ceremonial purpose; that the pipes were designed for use with reeds of the arghool type; and that the distances between the holes indicate that the tones proper to the instrument are those of the four foot octave.

For the better command in the holding of the pipes the natural lay of the fingers is with the second joints covering the holes, the tips of the fingers not being used for the purpose until later times. Peasants in the wilder parts of Europe and Asia retain the ancient custom.

All the holes are oval in shape. The divisions of the four holed pipe are from top hole to fourth 10-5/8 in., to the second 1-3/8 in., to the third 1-3/8 in., to the fourth 1-1/4 in., to the end 3 in.; these together making 17-5/8 in. The division of the three holed pipe are from the top to the first hole 13-1/2 in., to the second hole 1-3/8 in., to the third hole 1-3/8 in., to the end 1-1/2 in.; making 17-6/8 in. The stalk knots of the reed are in each pipe at 6-5/8 in. distant from the upper end, and a knot is again found at the the extreme lower end of the four holed pipe, causing the opening to be partially occluded. This contraction would have a flattening effect and consequently the three holed (which is free from such a knot) is the longer of the two, evidently cut with the view to coincide in pitch with the other. Obviously also each hole from the top is larger than the one previous; this arises from the fact that, as stated, the pipes are not truly cylindrical, but narrow toward the bottom, and so they may require the holes to be enlarged to sharpen the notes; equivalent this to cutting the holes higher.

To the musician investigating these matters it is of interest to observe that the two upper holes of the three-holed pipe coincide in their position with the two lowest holes of the four-holed pipe and consequently do not extend the compass of the notes, they merely pair the other pipe, yet if the reed of either differs, then, in flatness or sharpness the interval would show variation, and such an effect might be a designed one, giving a choice to the player. The lowest hole of the three-holed pipe extends the sounds that limit the tetrachord by one tone, and this method by extension reappears in aftertime in the Greek systems as an added tone also.

It is doubtful whether we are to consider that the open extreme end of a pipe is intended to produce a sound which is to be taken into the musical scale, even the least civilised people seeming to regard the note given as outside the designed series and not to be used; but it is easy to conceive how a pentatonic scale might have been developed by bringing it into use.

Another point to be noticed as affecting the pitch is that the distance between the fourth and the third holes is an eighth less than exists between other holes, and it may be that it was so intended to compensate for flatness, or to make a slight difference of interval.

The oval holes are not singular; I have several beautiful Japanese pipes with this feature in their construction. The coinciding holes of the two pipes may not have been intended to be identical in pitch or may have been used together to produce a quivering or voix céleste effect, through the partial shading of one by the fingers, and thus intended to give new resources to the skilful player. This is probable, because we find that at the present day the people of eastern climes are partial to this effect. The Egyptian zummarah, consisting of two unison pipes tied together is played to produce it. It is quite easy to obtain the waving of pitch to a large extent, by using two reeds that differ in stiffness.

That the sounds given by the flute holes originally located by the spread of the fingers should prove to be distant from each other approximately by the interval we call a tone, is a mere coincidence as of numerical relation, the more or less extent being ultimately adjusted by experience.

Another consideration I must tell you of because in my studies of old customs in instruments it has been impressed upon me too strongly to be neglected, and that is the old world tendency that prevails to make flat fourths. In the section on Chinese instruments this feature will be noticed though I do not think any other writer has mentioned it, and I believe the duplicates of certain fourths are only apparently such and are intended for the making of fourths of slightly different pitch, and that there is a practice of using one of these for the ascent and the other for the descent in the scale. I believe it to be a natural racial tendency to make flat fourths and that by provision of another note with a difference, they do a tuning based upon fourths accommodate the obtaining of the true octave.

One of those pipes gives a complete tetrachord, a perfect fourth, the other extends it by a minor third, interveningly the flat fourth and the augmented fourth may be found within the scale of the two pipes combined. Not the Greek tetrachord but one of more primitive arrangement, before laws had been formulated for the relative degrees of tone and hemitones. There is also a leap interval of a tone and a half, which characterises the earliest of lyre scales, and may be the link connecting the evolution of the Greek scale from the Egyptian. Indeed in Asia and Arabia similar usages still persist, and to the peoples’ ears give content, they want no other.

The subject is so interesting to the musician that the further analysis and investigation to which these valuable relics of a past age have been submitted, cannot fail of helping to a true understanding of the significance of the Lady Maket’s flutes, the oldest evidence of the world’s earliest music.

And indeed how tenderly human is their appeal across the centuries, for they bear even now evidences of the touch of the fingers of the dear lady who played her chosen flute music upon them so long and lovingly, and cherished them as companions in her life, and destined them also to befriend her in her dark tomb. Yes, you can plainly see, her fingers have worn away the rich orange stain from the beautifully shaped oval holes. For these flutes were finely finished and designed for true musical service and durability. Originally they had been orange-stained and wax polished, and when first found held that appearance, but exposure to the air darkened the wax to a deep brown colour, yet the holes reveal in lighter tint how they have been worn by the fingers. Perhaps the lady musician had several other pairs of flutes, apt for the expression of joy and mirthfulness, and left them to her friends, taking with her only the one pair with which her Ka would mourn the loss of friends and the light of the sun.

A remembrance comes fittingly in this place, of another lady of this long vanished race. In a royal tomb they found her, at El Amrah, wrapped round with the mystic robes of a ceremonial, that were to be her passport to the underworld during an unknown eternity; she was the daughter of Mena the founder of Memphis, and on her breast was written in the old hieroglyph letters, this simple message to the unseen power, who would judge her,—

“She was Sweet of Heart.”

—it was the last testimony of those who loved her. Sweet of heart, how near it brings her to our own loves. A touching epitaph to endure over six thousand years,—no woman could desire a more beautiful farewell.

The flutes that my thoughts so long lingered over are gone. They are deposited, after their strange travel, in the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford—a long way indeed from that land where the Lady Maket played them under a cloudless sky.