One of the frescoes in the British Museum shows two girls performing, apparently before a select audience of women, one of whom is seen to be applauding, or perhaps marking the time with syncopated clapping, as negroes do to-day.
Another representation of dancing is on a fresco from Thebes showing three figures, the centre of whom is apparently performing an entrechat, as seen to-day, the step in which the dancer crosses feet in mid-air; while a fourth acts as orchestra with a couple of the curious curved maces which were beaten together to mark the rhythm in sonorous fashion.
Other Egyptian monuments also show dancers, one from Beni Hassan depicting several couples, apparently boys, performing a dance that obviously had certain set steps, and suggests that it was used mainly as a rhythmic athletic exercise, as were many of the Greek dances. And yet another monument shows men apparently in the act of performing a pirouette. About them all there is the air of decision, a suggestion of trained performance that in itself, remembering that these monuments are some four thousand years old, and depict steps similar to some performed to-day, is testimony to the antiquity of the art of dancing.
CHAPTER III
GREECE
There is no lack of testimony, pictorial and literary, to the ancient Greek love of the Dance.
Among the various arts of war and peace that Vulcan engraved upon that wondrous shield which he fashioned at the entreaty of sad Thetis for her son Achilles, the Dance was not forgotten; and the Homeric singer must have been a lover of the art to limn as clear a picture as is given in the eighteenth book of the Iliad.
“There, too, the skilful artist’s hand had wrought
With curious workmanship, a mazy dance,