MUSICAL INSTRUMENTS - online book

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

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	5 a	MUSICAL INSTRUMENTS
	round his head, who is receiving an arrow from one of his attendants ; while a female, who is sitting near him, plays on a Trigonon. Towards the top of the bas-relief is represented a stage, on which are performers on small straight trumpets and little hand drums; six harpers; and four other musicians, appa­rently females,—the first of whom plays a flute; the second, a sort of pandean pipe; the third, an instrument which is too much defaced to be recognizable; and the fourth, a bagpipe. Two harps of a peculiar shape were copied by Sir Gore Ousely from Persian manuscripts about four hundred years old resembling, in the principle on which they are constructed, all other oriental harps. There existed evidently various kinds *of the chang. It may be remarked here that the instrument tsc/ienk (or chang) in use at the present day in Persia, is more like a dulcimer than a harp. The Arabs adopted the harp from the Per­sians, and called it junk An interesting repre­sentation of a Turkish woman playing the harp (p. 53) sketched from life by Melchior Lorich in the seventeenth century, probably exhibits an old Persian chang; for the Turks derived their music principally from Persia. Here we have an introduction into Europe of the oriental frame without a front pillar. The Persians appear to have adopted, at an early period,, smaller musical intervals than semitones. When the Arabs con­quered Persia (a.d. 641) the Persians had already attained a higher degree of civilisation than their conquerors. The latter found in Persia the cultivation of music considerably in advance of their own, and the musical instruments superior also. They soon adopted the Persian instruments, and there can be no doubt that the musical system exhibited by the earliest Arab writers whose works on the theory of music have been preserved was based upon an older system of the Persians. In these works the-

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