In some of the earliest designs which have come down to us the dancers moved, as stars, hand in hand round an altar, or person, representing the sun; either in a slow or stately method, or with rapid trained gestures, according to the ritual performed. Dancing, music and poetry were inseparable. Dancing is the poetry of motion, and its connection with music, as the poetry of sound, occurs at all times. In our own day musical themes are marked by forms originally dance times, as waltz time, gavotte time, minuet time, etc. [Illustration: Fig. 2.--Greek figures in a solemn dance. From a vase at Berlin.] Amongst the earliest representations that are comprehensible, we have certain Egyptian paintings, and some of these exhibit postures that evidently had even then a settled meaning, and were a phrase in the sentences of the art. Not only were they settled at such an early period (B.C. 3000, fig. 1) but they appear to have been accepted and handed down to succeeding generations (fig. 2), and what is remarkable in some countries, even to our own times. The accompanying illustrations from Egypt and Greece exhibit what was evidently a traditional attitude. The hand-in-hand dance is another of these. The earliest accompaniments to dancing appear to have been the clapping of hands, the pipes,[Footnote: Egyptian music appears to have been of a complicated character and the double pipe or flutes were probably reeded, as with our clarionet. The left pipe had few stops and served as a sort of hautboy; the right had many stops and was higher. The single pipe, (a) "The recorder" in the British Museum, is a treble of 10-1/2 in. and is pentaphonic, like the Scotch scale; the tenor (b) is 8-3/4 in. long and its present pitch--[Illustration: a] [Illustration: b] the guitar, the tambourine, the castanets, the cymbals, the tambour, and sometimes in the street, the drum. The following account of Egyptian dancing is from Sir Gardiner Wilkinson's "Ancient Egypt" [Footnote: Vol. i., p. 503-8.]:--