Travels to Discover the Source of the Nile, Volume 1 (of 5): In the years 1768, 1769, 1770, 1771, 1772 and 1773Bruce, James
History
Travels to Discover the Source of the Nile, Volume 1 (of 5): In the years 1768, 1769, 1770, 1771, 1772 and 1773
Bruce, James
Egypt -- Description and travel; Ethiopia -- Description and travel; Ethiopia -- History; Natural history -- Ethiopia; Nile River
I went back to my first harp, verified, and examined my drawing in all
its parts; it is with great pleasure I now give a figure of this second
harp to the reader, it was mislaid among a multitude of other papers,
at the time when I was solicited to communicate the former drawing to
a gentleman then writing the History of Music, which he has already
submitted to the public; it is very lately and unexpectedly this last
harp has been found; I am only sorry this accident has deprived the
public of Dr Burney’s remarks upon it. I hope he will yet favour us
with them, and therefore abstain from anticipating his reflections, as
I consider this as his province; I never knew any one so capable of
affording the public, new, and at the same time just lights on this
subject.
There still remained a third harp of ten strings, its precise form I do
not well remember, for I had seen it but once when I first entered the
cave, and was now preparing to copy that likewise. I do not recollect
that there was any man playing upon this one, I think it was rather
resting upon a wall, with some kind of drapery upon one end of it,
and was the smallest of the three. But I am not at all so certain of
particulars concerning this, as to venture any description of it; what
I have said of the other two may be absolutely depended upon.
I look upon these harps then as the Theban harps in use in the time of
Sesostris, who did not rebuild, but decorate ancient Thebes; I consider
them as affording an incontestible proof, were they the only monuments
remaining, that every art necessary to the construction, ornament, and
use of this instrument, was in the highest perfection, and if so, all
the others must have probably attained to the same degree.
We see in particular the ancients then possessed an art relative to
architecture, that of hewing the hardest stones with the greatest ease,
of which we are at this day utterly ignorant and incapable. We have
no instrument that could do it, no composition that could make tools
of temper sufficient to cut bass reliefs in granite or porphyry so
readily; and our ignorance in this is the more completely shewn, in
that we have all the reasons to believe, the cutting instrument with
which they did these surprising feats was composed of brass; a metal of
which, after a thousand experiments, no tool has ever been made that
could serve the purpose of a common knife, though we are at the same
time certain, it was of brass the ancients made their razors.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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