[15] C. R. Day: 'The Music and Musical Instruments of Southern India and the Deccan,’ London, 1891. [16] The music of a _raga_, which is very popular in Central India, is given in Tiersot, _Notes d’ethnographie musicale_, Plate 10. [17] This finds a curious parallel in the music of the dance of the _seis_ in the Cathedral of Seville--almost the only example of religious dancing in Christianity. [18] In the 'dance of Krishna,’ a three-day religious saturnalia in honor of the youthful god, and in the obscene rites of Kali, the black goddess, the _devadhazis_ portray all the phases of physical passion. [19] 'A number of young girls slowly and gracefully sway and twist their lithe bodies in rhythm to the music of flageolets playing in minor mode. Most of the time they dance on their knees, bending and twisting, their hair sometimes standing out almost straight, then falling about their heads.’ CHAPTER III THE MOST ANCIENT CIVILIZED NATIONS Conjecture and authority--The Assyrians and Babylonians; instruments; scales--The Hebrews--The Egyptians; social aspects; Plato’s testimony; instruments--Egyptian influence on Greek culture and its musical significance. The researches and discoveries of the past fifty years in the valley of the Nile and among the deeply buried ruins of Babylon and Nineveh have thrown light on much that was hitherto obscure in the history of the ancient cultured nations of the East. Yet, even to-day, our knowledge of that history is at best fragmentary and largely conjectural. Out of the mass of fragments and conjectures at our command we can pick very little that will fit into the structure of an authoritative musical history. We know definitely that the Assyrians, Babylonians, Egyptians, and Hebrews possessed in their heyday an advanced civilization and a large amount of æsthetic culture. From analogy with other old civilizations of which we have more accurate knowledge, however, we have no reason to suppose that their musical culture kept pace with their advance in other arts. From the plastic to the pictorial and last to the musical seems to have been the historical order of advance in the evolution of artistic expression. Music, to quote John Addington Symonds, 'is the essentially modern art.’ Nevertheless, even in default of any more specific evidence, we could safely assume that musical culture among the ancient civilized nations had advanced considerably beyond the stage reached by primitive peoples. I