The World's Earliest Music: Traced to Its Beginnings in Ancient Lands by Collected Evidence of Relics, Records, History, and Musical Instruments from Greece, Etruria, Egypt, China, Through Asyria and Babylonia, to the Primitive Home, the Land of Akkad and SumerSmith, Hermann
History
The World's Earliest Music: Traced to Its Beginnings in Ancient Lands by Collected Evidence of Relics, Records, History, and Musical Instruments from Greece, Etruria, Egypt, China, Through Asyria and Babylonia, to the Primitive Home, the Land of Akkad and Sumer
Smith, Hermann
Music -- To 500 -- History and criticism
These are the pathways of music, through which Greece derived her
knowledge by direct or indirect transmission. On the one hand we can
distinctly trace the line back to Chaldæa by way of Egypt; and on
the other hand back to Persia, where indeed the origin of the race
itself can be looked for. Not in any formal method do I wish this
diagram to be understood, for there may have been—and I should infer
were—crossings of influence, as between Chaldæa and Arabia, Egypt and
India, China and Persia, and so forth. Perhaps another plan of diagram
would be by placing Persia central as the source of early tribal
dispersion, with sign post pointing in the different directions to
Arabia, Chaldæa, India, China. Lydia includes the Asiatic coasts of the
Mediterranean. It appears to me that the Chinese influence upon the
Greeks was direct by commerce overland; and that in reference to time
there was a primitive branching off of the two races from some Persian
region.
The ethnological question is too deep for us to judge of, and we can
only take the guidance of those who are at this day the recognized
authorities. Mr. St. Chad Boscawen traces the Babylonian, the Egyptian,
and the Chinese civilizations to the mountainous regions of Western
Persia. It will be shown in the chapters on Etruscan lore how Greece
derived from Egypt through Etruria before she was in direct constant
intercourse with that land, and then subsequently developed her most
enduring records of musical art in the hands of the Etruscans. As
to China, there may seem at first some difficulty in recognition of
influence; but at all events silk from China had penetrated to the
Mediterranean before the Greeks knew how it was produced in “far
Cathay”; and in the motley gatherings of all peoples and tongues on the
coasts of the blue sea, doubtless the representative of the yellow race
one day found his way. The Greeks were great travellers; and who can
tell where the barrier was fixed that ordered them to turn back.
Persia has left no musical relics, and Mr. A. J. Ellis states: “Of the
ancient Persian scale we know nothing, but it was most probably the
progenitor of the older Greek.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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