The various kinds of flutes we see depicted by the Egyptians in their paintings, were used in concert with other instruments—lyres and grand harps in pairs, capable of giving fine volume of tone—through which the flutes would have to be heard, although not perhaps so simultaneous was the playing, as with us; since there are reasons for believing that their orchestration was more in the nature of alternation of instruments, one class leaving off and others taking up the strain and only occasionally combining for fulness or strength, associated perhaps with the voices of the multitude in popular acclaim. In later days in Egypt’s decline, it is on record that Ptolemy Philadelphus employed a band of 600 musicians to celebrate the feast of Bacchus. [Illustration: _Fig. 14._ _Arab Player on the Nay._] In India we find flutes which seem to show a compromise or blending of the tip-blown and side-blown methods. In the India Museum some pipes may be seen with a curiously shaped hollow tip, cut with a slant curve, across which the player blows. These several ways are but different illustrations of one and the same principle—that is to say—the stream of air blown _across_ the hole creates suction in the pipe, which reaching its limit is constantly broken with a rapidity of action resulting in periodic vibration of definite sound or pitch. On the walls of one of the Vase Rooms in the British Museum are displayed, running almost the length of the central part of the wall of the room, two wall paintings. The period is called Archaic, and the figures have a formality which contrasts with the freedom of design in a later period. In each painting, which is a facsimile from an Etruscan tomb at Corneto, there are two male flute players, and women dancing to their playing; and all the flutes they are using, and which they hold trumpet like before them, show reeds of the _arghool_ kind, the double step I pointed out just now being plainly marked, and the upper one in each instance coloured a brown olive, whilst the pipes are white. Seen through an opera glass the details are very distinct. One pair of pipes has three holes in each pipe marked. The pipes are thicker and shorter than the flutes in the Egyptian wall paintings described above, and we find that similar proportions are apparent in some Assyrian wall designs. In the tablets of Assurbanipal, date B.C. 650, the double pipes are short and are conical, which is quite a distinct feature in double pipes, and would cause the sounds to be an octave higher in pitch.