These harps, in my opinion, overturn all the accounts hitherto given of the earliest state of music and musical instruments in the east; and are altogether in their form, ornaments, and compass, an incontestible proof, stronger than a thousand Greek quotations, that geometry, drawing, mechanics, and music, were at the greatest perfection when this instrument was made, and that the period from which we date the invention of these arts, was only the beginning of the æra of their restoration. This was the sentiment of Solomon, a writer who lived at the time when this harp was painted. “Is there (says Solomon) any thing whereof it may be said, See, this is new! it hath been already of old time which was before us[123].” We find, in these very countries, how a later calamity, of the same public nature, the conquest of the Saracens, occasioned a similar downfal of literature, by the burning the Alexandrian library under the fanatical caliph Omar. We see how soon after, they flourished, planted by the same hands that before had rooted them out. The effects of a revolution occasioned, at the period I am now speaking of, by the universal inundation of the _Shepherds_, were the destruction of Thebes, the ruin of architecture, and the downfal of astronomy in Egypt. Still a remnant was left in the colonies and correspondents of Thebes, though fallen. Ezekiel[124] celebrates Tyre as being, from her beginning, famous for the tabret and harp, and it is probably to Tyre the taste for music fled from the contempt and persecution of the barbarous Shepherds; who, though a numerous nation, to this day never have yet possessed any species of music, or any kind of musical instruments capable of improvement. Although it is a curious subject for reflection, it should not surprise us to find here the harp, in such variety of form. Old Thebes, as we presently shall see, had been destroyed, and was soon after decorated and adorned, but not rebuilt by Sesostris. It was some time between the reign of Menes, the first king of the Thebaid, and the first general war of the Shepherds, that these decorations and paintings were made. This gives it a prodigious antiquity; but supposing it was a favourite instrument, consequently well understood at the building of Tyre[125] in the year 1320 before Christ, and Sesostris had lived in the time of Solomon, as Sir Isaac Newton imagines; still there were 320 years since that instrument had already attained to great perfection, a sufficient time to have varied it into every form.