The World's Earliest Music / Traced to Its Beginnings in Ancient Lands by Collected Evidence of Relics, Records, History, and Musical Instruments from Greece, Etruria, Egypt, China, Through Asyria and Babylonia, to the Primitive Home, the Land of Akkad and Sumer

by Hermann Smith

Hast sailed through all the seas of life,

With passion and with song.

Still we linger over the land of Greece, its haunting charm persists from youth to old age. Mr. F. G. Frazer, in his Pausanias, recalls the beautiful thought of Schiller, how, like that poet, the traveller,

“Might have seen as in a vision

The bright procession of the Gods

Winding up the long slope of Olympus,

Sometimes pausing to look back sadly

At a world where they were no longer needed.”

A glance at the map of Asia will show you a long trend of mountains from the Caspian Sea to the Persian Gulf. This vast plateau lies like a great backbone across Asia; the Caucasus, the Armenian mountains, the Zagros mountains, the Iranian mountains; on the eastern slope of these the Hindoo Cush, and the great Divide.