Exploring music in ancient Egypt

Heidi Köpp-Junk shares an overview of what she believes music in ancient Egypt sounded like, based on her research.

WHAT DID MUSIC sound like in pharaonic Egypt? The present article offers an overview of this topic, based on archaeological, pictorial, and textual sources. The research field that deals with these questions is music archaeology, a comparatively young branch of archaeology and Egyptology. A subdivision of this area is experimental music archaeology, in which instruments from earlier time periods are replicated and played, hence contributing significantly to the understanding of ancient Egyptian music. In the following, the author will take a closer look at this subject, and describes her experiences with replicas of ancient Egyptian musical instruments.

In pharaonic Egypt, music was not only meant for entertainment, but also played a significant role in the ritual context, be it in temples or tombs. Furthermore, it is attested at the royal court. Male and female musicians are represented in reliefs and paintings, often together in the same scene, but nevertheless in different roles. Thus, for instance, the flute was mainly played by men, the lute by women.

Various instruments such as rattles, clappers, sistra, menats, harps, lutes, lyres, flutes, and several forms of drums are attested in pharaonic times. Moreover, reed instruments, that is, forerunners of double clarinets and double oboes, are known from ancient Egypt. Various instruments that have been present in the world since the earliest times do not appear at all in Egypt. These include, for example, scrapers, conches, buzzers, and horns.

 

Lutes

Various lutes have survived as instruments and are nowadays kept in museums. For instance, two lutes are housed in the Egyptian Museum in Berlin (inv.-no. 17008, 17009), two further ones in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo – the latter are referred to as the dancer’s lute and the Harmose-lute in the secondary literature (CG 69421 (Harmose-lute); CG 69420 (dancer’s lute). The dancer’s lute was found in Tomb 1389 in Deir el-Medina, the Harmose-lute in the tomb of Harmose in Sheikh Abd el-Qurna. Both date to Dynasty 18. In general, two models should be distinguished, namely a smaller, two-stringed variant with a length of about 60cm (for example, the dancer’s lute), and a bigger, three-stringed type that is about 120cm long (for example, the Harmose-lute). In the case of the smaller model, the resonating body consists of a tortoise shell; the body of the bigger one is made of wood. Since various instruments are preserved as originals, their tuning as well as their construction technique is well understood. The author was even able to have a lute reconstructed in order to play it and analyse it in the context of experimental music archaeology. Sistrum, menat, rattles, and gods Since the Old Kingdom, that is, the time of the pyramids, the most important musical instrument for contacting the gods and to appease them has been the sistrum, which was generally regarded as typically Egyptian. However, my latest research shows that the sistrum was not “invented” in Egypt, but was already in use elsewhere in the world at least at the same time, if not earlier. However, the menat, which appeared at the same time as the sistrum, appears to be an Egyptian invention. These are parallel string rattles attached to a handle. While string rattles are certainly documented in Europe as early as the Mesolithic, the connection with a handle can only be observed in Egypt. However, the addition of such a handle makes it much easier to play this instrument and the blows are much more precise.

Before the sistrum and the menat were first documented in the Old Kingdom, rattles made of clay and arm-shaped clappers made of wood, bone, or ivory were used to contact and appease the gods. The musical instruments in use for this purpose therefore changed over the course of time. However, it is striking that in the earliest temples, as well as later, percussion instruments were primarily used, but no melodic or stringed instruments. In the earliest temples of the 4th and 3rd millennia BCE, a flute appears once, but no stringed instrument, although these were attested in the middle of the 3rd millennium BCE during the time of Khufu, especially in tombs. Lutes and harps are also the exception in the later temples. Of the numerous instruments represented in the pharaonic period, only very few appear in religious worship. The sound of ancient Egypt So far, a notation in the modern sense is not known from Egypt, so that we have no idea of the sound of the music, or the nature of the melodies. The fact that no notation has survived may mean two things.

On the one hand, it is possible that it existed, but has not yet been discovered; on the other hand, the ancient Egyptians might actually have played music without notes. If so, the melodies were passed on acoustically from one person to another.

At first glance, this may appear negative or perhaps even backwards. The absence of a notation system implies that the musicians played the melodies from memory alone. In this way, they have more freedom of interpretation and can focus completely on themselves and their instrument. Even today, one can play music on a professional level without being able to read notes. From a musical point of view, this type of making music may even be of a higher quality and a better performance, as the musicians are not solely dependent on a notation as a support, but instead have everything in their head.

The aim of experimental music archaeology is not the exact copying of ancient Egyptian melodies, because this is impossible, as no notation from that time is available. Yet, what can be achieved is the analysis of the musical instrument itself, that is how it was built, the technical details, how to replicate it, how to handle the instrument in practice, and what can be played with it.

Attested playing techniques

Basically, the musical instruments have been handed down from an archaeological context, they are depicted in the temples and tombs or they are mentioned in texts. There are instruments that appear in all three groups of sources, such as harps, lutes or rattles. However, some have only been handed down archaeologically, such as rattles. They are not depicted or mentioned in texts throughout the pharaonic period. Lyres and lutes are prominent in musical scenes and have also been preserved archaeologically. However, there are only four surviving texts in which lutes are mentioned, and none of these passages specify how the instrument was played. This is particularly interesting as the lute had to be held in a certain way (that is, on the forearm) so as not to cover the sound holes.

It is therefore interesting that we learn from the textual evidence that the instruments were known and used, but not how they were played. The pictorial representations provide more information, even if caution is required there, as in the example of the round frame drum from Athribis. The playing style depicted there is practically impossible to understand.

Why the playing style is not mentioned in the texts is only indirectly apparent. The texts are not about the music or the instruments themselves, but have a different focus. This is of course highly unpleasant for the music archaeologist and that is not a result one would have expected. But the practical handling of other objects is not described in the texts either. For example, there are no instructions for driving a chariot in any of the texts, or how the pyramids were built.

With regard to experimental music archaeology on ancient Egyptian instruments, it should be noted that the textual evidence does not provide any valuable information on the playing technique of a musical instrument from the pharaonic period. A little more information can be gained from the pictorial evidence. Further information can be obtained by playing such replicas, that is, which types of playing are possible, how they are most comfortable to play and how they produce the loudest or quietest sound. However, it is important to be able to correlate this way of playing with representations. If this is not the case, one can only point out that one or other way of playing is theoretically possible, but cannot be proven in practice for pharaonic Egypt. The limits and possibilities of experimental music archaeology must always be kept in mind. Not everything that can be played on replicas of ancient Egyptian instruments was performed in exactly the same way in pharaonic times. For example, it is possible to play the riff of “Smoke on the water” (Deep Purple 1971) on my replica of the dancer’s lute whose tuning has survived from pharaonic times. The limits and possibilities of music archaeology thus become clear.

Nonetheless, music archaeology provides us with a completely new way into ancient Egypt that goes beyond the mere observation of pyramids and tombs and enables a far more personal approach to the people of that time. Summary Already from the Old Kingdom, numerous textual, archaeological, and iconographic attestations for music and musicians have survived. Each instrument group, that is, idiophones (percussion), aerophones (wind instruments), membranophones (drums), and chordophones (stringed instruments), is already found in this early period and was used throughout Egyptian history. New instruments were added, without ever replacing the already existing ones. An exception is the double clarinet that was supplanted by the double oboe in the New Kingdom.

The fact that modern music can be played on a replica of an ancient Egyptian lute as well highlights the limits and possibilities of music archaeology that researchers always need to bear in mind.

Dr Heidi Köpp-Junk is an Egyptologist, archaeologist and music archaeologist. She is assistant professor in Egyptian archaeology at the Institute of Mediterranean and Oriental Cultures, Polish Academy of Sciences Warsaw. For sound examples see her website.  Drop Heidi an email – she will be happy to answer any questions,