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.
| Fig. 5. The Gingroi, or flutes of wailing. | Found in Lady Maket’s Tomb. |
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.