CHAPTER IX.
Back to the Land of the Nile.
EGYPT REVEALS THE SECRET.
What! didn’t you know? I thought that everybody knew that. Why not have asked before? Could have told you at any time. That is the way that secrets have of coming out,—“promiskuss like,” as they say in the village. Now it seems that the bulbed mystery that we have been tantalized about, and which has so worried the lobes of our brain on sleepless nights, is after all a piece of nature, coaxed by artifice to be non-natural. A method of waist making was practised in early life to ensure the result desired; it was an instance not of design in nature, but of design upon nature, much as the modern young lady’s waist is. The simplicity of the explanation is charming. There is a passage in Pliny referred to by Mr. W. Chappell in his History of Music, and I will quote what he says. What it means I do not know, but that is by no means an objection, as one mystery is at least left, and what we shall do when every secret is open is a mystery past finding out!
Pliny, in describing the reeds grown in Lake Orchomenus, in Bœotia, says that one which was pervious throughout was called the piper’s reed (_Auleticon_). This reed, says he, used to take nine years to grow, as it was for that period the waters of the lake were continually on the increase. If the flood lasted at the full for a year the reeds were cut for double pipes (_Zeugitæ_), and if the waters subsided sooner, the reeds were not so fine, were called _Bombyciæ_, and were used for single pipes.
There is another account of this furnished by the ever learned Mr. J. F. Rowbotham, in his so styled “History of Music,” which is no history, but a monologue (attractive, truly) on the historical progress of the art of music during some centuries. He says that the whole account is in Theophrastus (Hist. Plant, IV., 11), and names the lake differently. The passage runs thus:—
But most of all was Antigenedes renowned for the care he took in choosing his flutes. And we hear that he altered the time of cutting the reeds from September to July or June. For the reeds of which the flutes were made grew in the Lake Copais, in Bœotia, which also furnished Pindar and the Theban flute players with flutes. And this is the way that the reeds were cut. The flute reed always grew when the lake was full with a flood, which took place about once in every nine or ten years. Its time of growing was when, after a rainy season, the water had kept in the lake two years or more,—and the longer the better. And it was a stout, puffy reed, fuller and more fleshy and softer in appearance than other reeds. And when the lake was swollen, the reeds increased in length. And the time of cutting was in the rainy season in September. And this was the time of cutting, up to Antigenedes’ time. And he changed the time of cutting to June or July,—_i.e._, in the heat of summer. And the pipes cut at this period, they say, became seasoned much sooner; three years were sufficient to season these, whilst the others cut in the rainy season took many years to season. This is what they tell us. But I think that it was another reason which induced him to cut them in the dry season. And that was to get the reeds crisper and shorter and smaller in the bore, and that for this he was ready to sacrifice even beauty of tone to get them crisp and small. It was at any rate to get some peculiar and highly artificial effect.
Doubtless, the original readers understood the author, and filled in implied details which we are in the dark about. The ancient writers avoid telling us what we want most to know. It is, for instance, at times, doubtful whether the name _reed_ always refers to the body of the pipe, or at times to the vibrating reed, and a writer or translator would easily fall into error if without practical knowledge of wind instruments, just as they do in similar matters of musical detail at the present time. Some ancient writers, we know, wrote only from reports on the subject of music, being themselves ignorant upon it, although they are in several instances our chief authorities for the learning of the ancients thereon.
To the description given by Mr. W. Chappell, he adds his own comment: “these reeds throw out shoots around them, and perhaps each row of shoots may have been counted as a year’s growth.” I am not so sure that a reed “pervious throughout” would throw off shoots; some such are merely sheathed like bulrushes and flags. The contention of Mr. Rowbotham that Antigenedes “must needs change the time of cutting flute reeds, in order to get crisp reeds, and reeds with small bores, and that they might give out these (_Hemiolian Chromatic_) querulous intervals” is not convincing, and the use of the word “querulous” betrays that he is “begging the question”; indeed, his point is that “the age was an age of quibbling and cavilling and hair splitting, and these subtleties of thought had their parallel or consequence in other things as well,”—including querulous flutes. This imagined correspondence between things and thoughts shews the writer to be clever as a special pleader, but that he is a specialist in wind instruments does not follow. The question is still open, did Theophrastus speak of flute reeds or of flute pipes, or of the reeds to be used for bulbs, or of those for making reed tongues?
Antigenedes wrote about the year 450 B.C., it is said, that he increased the number of holes of the flute. It is a curious coincidence that Ling Lun the Chinese minister of Huang-Ti, was also sent to a _chosen spot_, called Tahsia (since identified as Bactria, the mother of cities from its unrivalled antiquity) west of the Kuenlun mountains, where there is a valley called Chichku where bamboos of regular thickness grew, that he might there choose the finest sort for music, and thus set out the true _lus_ or laws and principles. How strangely the Greeks and Chinese tales agree, that the pipes must be very choice, and of a particular growth.
Some years back, when I first entertained the idea that these bulbs figuring on the vases represented real hollow bulbs, I sought high and low for evidence of any species of reed growing with such distinct shape that it could be so employed. I made enquires of curators at South Kensington botanical departments, and also at Kew, but without success, and no botanist could afford me the information that I was anxious for. There was no reed, neither roots of reeds, anywhere answering the description.
Yet such reeds grew! It is because the nature of the growth of the reed has assumed a most interesting importance at the present stage of our investigations, that I have introduced these quotations from the ancient writers.
A very valuable piece of information has recently been obtained from Egypt, and we owe our knowledge of it to Mr. T. L. Southgate who read a paper at a Musical Association meeting, upon the pair of Egyptian flutes found and shown by Mr. Petrie. He had obtained tidings and measurements of similar pipes in foreign museums, and gave particulars of experiments as to pitch, and showed a model made according to details communicated to him by M. Maspero of a so-called flageolet with eleven holes, found in ancient Panopolis anterior to the eighteenth dynasty, 1500 B.C. This extraordinary find he stated, was furnished with a moveable beak of the whistle kind, and it gave a scale of semitones and two enharmonic intervals; and the scale, he maintained, corresponded almost exactly with our present chromatic scale. Thus the musical acquirement of the Egyptians was raised to a most exalted level, much beyond anything ascribed to that people, and some head-shakings and symptoms of unbelief became manifest among the curious musicians assembled. I confess that I was among the doubters. Neither the flageolet nor the scale seemed to me to conform to the genius of the people, as shown in their tablets of stone, or papyrus rolls, or wall paintings. The date 1500 B.C.—four hundred years older than the Lady Maket flutes—was understood to be fixed by M. Maspero, and confirmed by other recognised Egyptologists, and the genuineness of the relic seemed vouched for.
And now comes the strange part of the discovery. It was found that the supposed flageolet beak was no flageolet affair at all, neither in form nor purpose, and that what had been interpreted in the drawing as a whistle mouth was the representation merely of a patch of pitch or bitumen that had in ancient days got attached to the original. About as dumbfounding an experience as that which befel the renowned Mr. Pickwick at the deciphering of the ever memorable Roman inscription. We may now sing old Hummel’s chorus:—
“Light, light in darkness, The daylight dawns;”
for the mistake brought out the secret, and the information long wanted was to be had for the asking, and came out in a very matter of fact way. M. Maspero says that the head piece found with the pipe was a hollow piece of reed, bulb shaped, and that it was a custom to grow such bulbs by subjecting the reed during its early growth to artificial constraint. Places in the reed would be chosen, round which, when it was about half an inch in diameter, a string or other fibre would be wound closely, and the reed so treated left otherwise to grow to its proper growth of about exteriorly three quarters of an inch. The artificial waist therefore remained with, say, a quarter inch interior diameter, whilst the other portion expanded in growth as usual, and thus these mysterious bulbs were formed. The explanation is delightfully simple, and the wonder is that no one thought of it before, for I expect that there are similar practices of reed torture going on in other parts of the world, which probably even our botanists could have made us acquainted with.
The difficulties of obtaining knowledge from those who know is, however, a common experience; not that knowledge is refused or withheld, but that the specialist and the neophyte seem unable to get into the same line of sight, and between the two there is often a great lack of perceptivity of the actual kind of help wanted, and the language of reply only perhaps may serve to show us what dumb creatures we are in our endeavours to understand one another.
The eleven holed pipe was found in 1888. As M. Maspero has no doubt about the age of this flute, and maintains that it dates back to the eighteenth dynasty, and as he is in the front rank of authority as an Egyptologist, we have to accept his decision, although it throws previous conclusions into confusion.
The Chinese are held to have possessed an octave scale of twelve semitones more than four thousand years ago, but heretofore we had no hint of an early existence of such amongst the Egyptians, nor of an intercourse with China which would account for identity. It is altogether mysterious, and raises new questions of affinities, and of the evolution of mind in the human race.
So far the details afforded give a new insight into the nature of the bulbed flute, they tend to support my idea of the use of the bulb for holding a concealed reed.
As it is, Egypt has revealed one secret concerning the subulone flutes, and shown that the double and triple bulbs depicted on the Etruscan vases are essentials of the structure of the flutes, and can no longer be regarded as conventional ornament.
M. Maspero sent Mr. Southgate a tracing of the bulb piece in his possession, who has obliged me with a copy of it. The dark irregular patches are due to accidental adherence of some bitumen. The numerals indicate merely proportions in the interior diameters.
In the times of the earlier civilizations, men had a wonderfully direct way of obtaining their ends; they chose the simplest means and the fittest, and the survival of their method down to our days is the best proof of a judgment almost as unerring as instinct. With all our mechanical appliances, we can do little better than modify and develop the designs we have inherited. In our wind instruments, everywhere the primitive remains, even as the type of race remains.