59 The Cane Harp from Borneo, with Tamburine Bells 304 60 The Chelys or Greek Tortoiseshell Lyre 309 61 The Muse Terpsichore with a Lyre 315 62 Greek Players Tuning the Lyre and Dancing 316 63 The Muse Erato Playing the Psaltery 317 64 The Muse Erato Playing on a Trigon, from a Vase in the Munich Collection 321 “The true nature of a thing is whatsoever it becomes when the process of its development is complete.” ARISTOTLE. THE WORLD’S EARLIEST MUSIC. CHAPTER I. At the Gates of the Past. The human interest in the past never dies, its hold upon us increases with the growing years, and every gain that is made to the store of knowledge does but add to the zest with which we search for more; nation vies with nation for the glory of recovering relics of life that are strewn along the path of death. From the sands and from the tombs, from the paintings and the graven tablets, and from the faces of the rocks we rehabilitate the vision of the mighty dead; a recovered name is a page of a people’s history, and we seek with renewal of eagerness for the pages that should follow or precede. The long buried spoils of temples and palaces excite the imagination, the grandeur of gold and silver, the wealth of art and ornament, and the resplendent jewels, appeal to the love of power and of possession, active or dormant in every heart; yet not less do we treasure the fragile mementoes, the simplest things, rendered up from the past that were the surroundings of domestic life, that speak to us of the household ways, and of the personal pursuits of the men, and of the adornment of the women who for untold ages have ever sought “their pleasure in their power to charm.” The instruments of music that in the remoter ages of the past were in daily use are seldom found, for the nature of the materials of which they were constructed was adverse to their preservation; those that have been found are rarely in their original condition, perfect in all their parts, or suitable for being put to the test of playing, and the resource left to us is to obtain some approximate condition by means of models, and then adapt some modern method for eliciting sound, which method as near as we can judge shall be the counterpart of the original device. My conviction is that to understand the old music the first necessity is to question the old instruments, that they will best indicate and tell most clearly what the music must have been.