In India we find flutes which seem to show a compromise or blending of the tip-blown and side-blown methods. In the India Museum some pipes may be seen with a curiously shaped hollow tip, cut with a slant curve, across which the player blows. These several ways are but different illustrations of one and the same principle—that is to say—the stream of air blown across the hole creates suction in the pipe, which reaching its limit is constantly broken with a rapidity of action resulting in periodic vibration of definite sound or pitch.
On the walls of one of the Vase Rooms in the British Museum are displayed, running almost the length of the central part of the wall of the room, two wall paintings. The period is called Archaic, and the figures have a formality which contrasts with the freedom of design in a later period. In each painting, which is a facsimile from an Etruscan tomb at Corneto, there are two male flute players, and women dancing to their playing; and all the flutes they are using, and which they hold trumpet like before them, show reeds of the arghool kind, the double step I pointed out just now being plainly marked, and the upper one in each instance coloured a brown olive, whilst the pipes are white. Seen through an opera glass the details are very distinct. One pair of pipes has three holes in each pipe marked. The pipes are thicker and shorter than the flutes in the Egyptian wall paintings described above, and we find that similar proportions are apparent in some Assyrian wall designs. In the tablets of Assurbanipal, date B.C. 650, the double pipes are short and are conical, which is quite a distinct feature in double pipes, and would cause the sounds to be an octave higher in pitch.
The two extremes I have cited, during which the double pipes of the original style are in evidence, cover a long period, the wall paintings of the time of Thotmes the Third and the carvings on the Sanchi Tope gate—that is from B.C. 1600 to about A.D. 100. During all these centuries, the double flutes have entered into the national life of many peoples, and at various times concurrently one or other of the varieties I have named have likewise been in popular favour. One remarkable period, however, there was, when an innovation intervened. A new Greek invention appeared, and held the field for several centuries. Etruria, about B.C. 500, seems to have been the place of origin of the new double flutes; or it may be said that here they come first into historic presence. On this Italian plain a Greek colony settled; and we consequently term these flutes Greco-Etruscan flutes, the distinguishing features of which have been preserved for us on the marvellously beautiful vases that were buried in their tombs,—death being the preserver of empictured life.
Here then we leave the valley of the Nile, and, after an interval of six centuries from Lady Maket’s decease, view another and a distant region, amid a new state of civilisation. One lingering touch of association with the Lady Maket’s flutes is found in Miss A. B. Edwards’s description of a funeral in Egypt in the year when she travelled “One Thousand Miles up the Nile.”
At a funeral in Nubia, the ceremonial with its dancing and chanting was always much the same, always barbaric and in the highest degree artificial. The dance is probably Ethiopian; the white fillet worn by the choir of mourners is on the other hand distinctly Egyptian. We afterwards saw it represented in paintings of funeral processions on the walls of several tombs at Thebes, where the wailing women are seen to be gathering up dust in their hands and casting it upon their heads just as they do now. As for the wail—beginning high and descending through a scale, divided not by semitones but thirds of tones, to a final note about an octave and a half lower than that from which it started—it probably echoes to this day the very pitch and rhythm of the wail that followed the Pharaohs to their sepulchres in the valley of the tombs of the kings. Like the zaghareet or joy cry which every mother teaches to her little girl (and which, it is said, can only be acquired in very early youth), it has been handed down from generation to generation, through an untold succession of ages. The song to which the Fellah works his shadoof, and the monotonous chant of the shakkieh driver, have perhaps as remote an origin; but of all mournful human sounds, the death wail that we heard at Derr is perhaps one of the very oldest,—certainly the most mournful.
From this vivid picture of real life we can now understand that our little wailing flutes, recovered from that rock cut tomb, meant very much to the old Egyptian race.
A piece of the old poetic writings comes to me at the time present, that seems to complete the circle of our thoughts around this long lost nation—it comes from old Chaldea, the motherland, is one of the choice and highly valued finds of explorers, recently acquired by the British Museum,—tablets of popular songs of Chaldea which date at least B.C. 2300, and possibly earlier. These are distinctly called songs. One bard says,—
I will sing the song of the Lady of the Gods;
Listen the great ones,
Attend ye warriors,