To understand aright the process of evolution I think it very desirable that the imagination should have free play, and take us into the scenery and into the time in which it was going on, and if we can, by any chance glow of fancy, get the very atmosphere about us.
The earliest lyre of which we have any representation is the three-stringed lyre. Such a lyre is seen at page 13, the same as was slung on the mast of Queen Hatasu’s ship that she sent to the coast of Arabia.
Next in advance is the four-stringed lyre of the same pattern. In the British Museum there are two ancient examples of these. (Fig. [47]). They usefully make clear the construction. The upper figure shews the complete instrument; the lower figure shews the interior part of the construction, the skin or parchment covering of the top of the boat being absent. The framework was covered over with thin wood or with skin, lizard skin for choice. Some illustrations of examples of this kind of lyre show that the end of the bow where the pegs are inserted, was cut to receive the strings, exactly as in later ages in violins.
Fig. 47.
This summer at Burlington House, Mr. Garstang exhibited a five-stringed lyre of this pattern which in his exploration he had recovered from one of the tombs at Beni-Hassan, which had not been in daylight for more than three thousand years. The strings naturally had perished long ago.
In the earliest times after the Egyptians had begun to depict the incidents of their daily life, and to make record of their nation’s history on the walls of tombs and temples, we find three distinct types of musical stringed instruments possessed by them; sometimes the representations of these are given in relief carved in stone, sometimes incised only and painted. Not decoration but history their minds were set upon; each man who had power held his own individual history to be of supreme importance, and thus there has been left to us a picture book of priceless veracity.
In the times when these pictures were made they already had the instruments in a high state of development, say from 4000 to 6000 years ago, and we are left to guess how long a course of time must have been necessary before from the primitive rude state they could have reached the perfected state the paintings disclose to us.
To make clear the way of evolution I recognise but three types, and class these as,—