Again, at the public ceremonies which took place on the accession of a
prince to the throne the new monarch addressed a prayer to the god, in
which occurred the following allegorical expression:――“I am thy flute;
reveal to me thy will; breathe into me thy breath like into a flute,
as thou hast done to my predecessors on the throne. As thou hast
opened their eyes, their ears, and their mouth to utter what is good,
so likewise do to me. I resign myself entirely to thy guidance.”
Similar sentences occur in the orations addressed to the monarch. In
reading them one can hardly fail to be reminded of Hamlet’s
reflections addressed to Guildenstern, when the servile courtier
expresses his inability to “govern the ventages” of the pipe and to
make the instrument “discourse most eloquent music,” which the prince
bids him to do.
M. de Castelnau, in his “Expédition dans l’Amérique,” gives among the
illustrations of objects discovered in ancient Peruvian tombs a flute
made of a human bone. It has four finger holes at its upper surface
and appears to have been blown into at one end. Two bone flutes (Figs.
18_b_ & _c_), in appearance similar to the engraving given by M. de
Castelnau, which have been disinterred at Truxillo, are deposited in
the British Museum. They are about six inches in length, and each is
provided with five finger holes. One of these has all the holes at its
upper side, and one of the holes is considerably smaller than the
rest. The specimen which we illustrate (Fig. 18_a_) is ornamented with
some simple designs in black.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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