MUSICAL INSTRUMENTS - online book

The History And Development Of Musical Instruments From The Earliest Times.

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	MUSICAL INSTRUMENTS.	33
	well as at the front. The kymbala were made of metal, and resembled our small cymbals. The krotala were almost identical with our castanets, and were made of wood or metal. The Etruscans and Roman.-. The Romans are recorded to have derived some of their most popular instruments originally from the Etruscans; a people which at an early period excelled all other Italian nations in the cultivation of the arts as well as in social refinement, and which possessed musical instruments similar to those of the Greeks. It must, however, be remembered that many of the vases and other specimens of art which have been found in Etruscan tombs, and on which delineations of lyres and other instruments occur, are supposed to be productions of Greek artists whose works were obtained from Greece by the Etruscans, or who were induced to settle in Etruria. The flutes of the Etruscans were not unfrequently made of ivory; those used in religious sacrifices were of box-wood, of a species of the lotus, of ass' bone, bronze and silver. A bronze flute, somewhat resembling our flageolet, has been found in a tomb; likewise a huge trumpet of bronze. An Etruscan comu (engraved) is deposited in the British museum, and measures about four feet in length. To the Etruscans is also attributed by some the invention of the hydraulic organ. The Greeks pos­sessed a some­what similar con­trivance which they called hy-draulos, i.e. water-flute, and which probably was identical with the orgamim hydraulicum of the Romans. The instrument ought more 7

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