BOB Cribbs was an unusual American friend who loved Egypt and Egypt loved him. One day, we were talking about ancient music and how the different cultures influenced each other. We got talking about the relationship between the Pharaonic and Greek civilisations, especia1ly in the field of music; Ancient Egypt was the main source of knowledge for the Greeks and other nations.
Egyptian music was, for example, a vital element in Plato’s Republic. Pythagoras, who invented a musical scale of seven notes, spent 21 years of his life in Egypt
Did Pythagoras acquire his knowledge from Egypt? If so, how can we prove this, especially as we don’t have any recordings of Ancient Egyptian music, whether in the form of recorded music or written scores.
We started researching all the publications about this subject, in particular the works of Dr Hans Hickman, the former curator of the Ancient Egyptian Musical Instrument Section in the Egyptian Museum.
We realized that in order to answer this question, we had to investigate Ancient Egyptian musical instruments and actually try to play them. We found that these instruments were of three types: stringed, percussion and wind.
The first group was useless for our purposes, because once a stringed instrument lose its strings, you could never tell what the· strings were like; even if the strings still existed, you could never tell how they were tuned Nor could we tell what notes the percussion instruments played.
So we were left with the wind instruments, because the notes made by the instruments depend on the position of the holes on the tube, which isn’t affected by time. We decided that, if we could play such instruments, maybe we could rediscover the Ancient Egyptian musical scale.
We met with Minister of Culture Farouq Hosni and he immediately gave us the green light for this experiment. We formed a team of three leaders – myself, Bob and the late famous Egyptian flautist, Mahmoud Effat.
We were supported by a group of junior staff. Bob started to construct special equipment with which we could measure with great precision the frequencies coming out of these flutes when they were played.
We started classifying the different types of flutes inside the Egyptian Museum. Of 24 flutes inside a showcase, 18 were classified as clarinet-type instruments needing a mouthpiece or reed to blow into, in order to produce a sound. Unfortunately, their mouthpieces were all missing.
Then we were left with six flutes or nays that operate without a mouthpiece or reed and that was our first step on the way to rediscovering the Ancient Egyptian musical scale. More on this next week.
