There is an instrument which may stand as a representative of the many stringed, and as indicating the class of so-called _Trigons_, almost letter D shape. It is depicted upon an ancient vase in the Munich collection (Fig. 64). It is supposed to be in the hands of Erato, she holds it against her left shoulder, not as is the custom with our modern players of harps, resting on the right shoulder; obviously the custom in each case is the one best suited to the convenience of the player and to the different demands upon the instruments in ancient and in modern use. The vase is Etruscan, but the lyre is Egyptian in origin and Asian in style, witness the leopard skin spread upon the seat. The artist was at fault in his drawing. The lyre is of the Egyptian model, the bulk or thick portion of the boat-form being thrown upward above the shoulder, and this as a sounding-board should have been made plain. This particular development of style I should surmise to be Lydian, or perhaps, more southern in origin, possibly Assyrian. [Illustration: _Fig. 64._] Plato and Plutarch both comment upon many-stringed lyres, condemning their use and advocating a return to the ancient simplicity. Old Pausanias, who wrote at a much later period “a Description of Greece,” shews himself familiar with the many-stringed by a simile he uses, stating that “in Egypt he had seen the pyramids, had beheld with wonder the colossal statue of Memnon at Thebes, and had heard the musical sound, like the breaking of a lyre string, which the statue emitted at sunrise.” The breaking of strings is thus known to be an old-world trouble, and no doubt Pausanias had often heard the sound, else this reference would not have come to him so naturally as a fitting illustration; only a large or many stringed-lyre would give a noticeably musical sound; an instrument with short strings equal to our violin strings would give but a brief snap, not in any degree a musical sound. Desiring a personal experience I suggested to a friend a realistic test, and he kindly strained a string of his violoncello to breaking point. So we knew that the sound heard in this catastrophic incident of to-day, was certainly not of the nature that the great travellers of past days were attracted to as one of the wonders of the world. A many stringed harp somewhat of the capacity of modern harps would, however, under the shock communicate a thrill over the whole range, finding out a sympathetic resonance from vibration of those strings that happened to be in accord with the pitch of the sounding-body, and this kind of response on the breaking of a string was probably that which furnished old Pausanias’s memory with so pertinent a simile. Whoever has heard one of the higher pianoforte strings break will understand fairly enough the nature of the sound. The statue was 69 feet high, and it was reared by Amenhotep III., about 1450 B.C.