Importing Thigh Bones
A few years ago a certain gentleman decided to join the ever-popular Digging Up the Past of the Middle East. He paid his money, obtained his visas, packed his bags and then, as the date of departure drew ever closer, he went round his friends and asked what they would like him to bring back for them as a souvenir of his travels. One of these friends, a slighty eccentric musician, had his answer ready. He would like, he said, a human thigh-bone.
Our tourist blinked, taken aback. "Fresh?" he enquired, anxiously.
No, the friend replied, it did not have to be fresh. Indeed, the older the better. It seems that the friend was interested in the history of musical instruments and had read somewhere that the first flutes were made from human thigh-bones. It was his desire to recreate one of these instruments but so far his ambition had been thwarted by the selfish preference of most Australians for keeping their thigh-bones inside their own legs.
Our tourist promised to see what he could do and promptly forgot about the request. In company with the rest of our tour members he toiled up the pyramids, down the tomb shafts, across the desert and into the luxurious dining room of the Shepherd Hotel in Cairo. In due course he boarded the air-conditioned coach for the journey to the Fayyum Oasis and there explored the ruined pyramids of Hawwara and Lahun. Near the latter of these is the buried village of Kahun, distinguishable from the surrounding desert only by the quantities of broken pottery strewing the ground.
Among this pottery, our tourist spotted a human thigh-bone.
Now I want to emphasise that our tours are serious archaeological study expeditions. We adopt a responsible attitude towards the sites we visit and we strongly encourage responsible behaviour by the tour members. Anyone caught with a spray can of paint in their luggage, (graffiti, for the making of) will suffer the severest possible penalties — see our free guide to travel in the Middle East, under the heading "Capital punishment".
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| By sheer chance I took a photograph of the ground at Kahun on that trip and when the film was developed, realised that I may have photographed the very femur abstracted by our hero! |
Our tourist was fully aware of our position regarding despoiling archaeological sites and for a moment stood at gaze, wrestling with his conscience. Alas, cupidity proved stronger than ethics. Glancing around hurriedly to see whether he was observed, he scuttled over, snatched up his treasure and hastily stuffed it down his trousers. If he limped at all when boarding the bus with two bones in his leg, no-one noticed.
Indeed, we first became aware of his misdemeanour when we arrived in Jerusalem and, his tongue loosened by pride, he boasted to us of his success in smuggling his ill-gotten loot out of Egypt. (The penalties for attempting to export antiquities from Egypt without a licence are severe and are fully supported by us.) We did not know what to do. We could not see that any useful purpose would be served by taking his bone from him: no museum would be interested in something without provenance and it was not possible for us to replace it in Kahun. We took a slight revenge, however, by reminding him that Australian customs were likely to be less easy to evade. His smirk disappeared with gratifying swiftness and we left the culprit to meditate on the likely consequences of his sins.
For the benefit of readers outside Australia, we should perhaps explain that Australia is an island continent, protected from the pests and diseases of the rest of the world by vast expanses of ocean. To preserve these natural barriers inviolate, the Australian customs department in its wisdom has decreed that, without a special licence no-one may import any animal or vegetable matter in its natural state. Ladies who alight at Mascot airport still wearing the orchids presented to them by passionate Orientals are likely to have them removed and destroyed. Scientists returning with samples of rare bird-life or exotic insects suffer a similar fate. (Men returning with Phillipino wives are, however, exempt.)
It was with considerable trepidation, therefore, that our tourist watched the tour group's suitcases being loaded into the x-ray machine at Mascot. The first few cases went through without a flicker of an eye from the bored-looking individual who sat slumped in front of the cathode ray tube. Then came our tourist's case. The conveyor belt churned away, the case disappeared into the bowels of the machine and the uniformed attendant was galvanised into life. He sat up sharply and punched a button.
The machine halted, then ground unhurriedly into reverse. Our tourist's case trundled slowly backwards. Just as it was about to emerge into the daylight again, however, the uniformed one punched another button. Once more the machine changed direction and swallowed up the case again, this time bringing it to a halt in the full glare of the machine's magic eye. The official stared at his screen and then raised his head and looked about him.
Perspiring heavily, our tourist stepped forward. "It — er — it could be mine," he quavered.
"Do you," the customs official demanded heavily, "have a human bone in there?"
"Er — er — er," our tourist stammered, "er — possibly."
"Oh, that‘s all right, then."
The official punched his keyboard again and resumed his jaded scrutiny of the passing cases!
Graeme Lawson of the Music-Archaeological survey in Cambridge has adopted a less perilous method of studying the history of musical instruments. He travels to museums around the world to examine the ancient bone flutes in their possession, and then makes a plastic replica and tries to play it. So far he has a Saxon instrument, several from the Roman and Greek periods and one, allegedly 24,000 years old from the late Palaeolithic period in France. This latter is made from a vulture's bone and was found back in the 1920s. The fragments lay for many years in a museum case but recently some sharp-eyed student realised that there were enough pieces to make a complete instrument. Mr Lawson is now able to bring you a plastic version of Stone Age music.
The purpose of Mr Lawson's study is to find out the type of music played by the ancients. The modern musical scale is an adaptation of the ancient Greek kithera, a four stringed instrument which was tuned — as far as we can tell — at intervals of tone-tone-semitone. This is equivalent, for example, to C-D-E-F on a piano. Add a second kithera on top, with its lower note a full tone higher than the highest of the first kithera, and you have the rest of the modern scale: G-A-B-C.
We can be fairly sure of this analysis because of the work of Pythagoras — the Greek philosopher who spent his time seating squaws on hippopotamus hides. He had the idea that there was a correlation between musical intervals and planetary positions and devoted considerable time to analysing and explaining his ideas. It is from him and his followers that we derive the phrase, "the music of the spheres".
Modern western music has added a further complication: well-tempered tuning. A piano or an organ on which the white notes are perfectly tuned — thus giving the key of C — will sound out of tune if the musician attempts to play in any other key — say, A flat. Pianists struggled with this problem for many years until someone invented "well-tempered" tuning, in which the frequency of every semitone is 5.9% higher than the previous one. To the purist, any scale on such an instrument will sound ever so slightly out of tune, but as they are all equally out of tune, the result is that you can play successfully in any key. J. S. Bach celebrated the advent of this type of tuning by writing twenty-four pieces of music, one each in every major and minor key.
Knowing how great are the differences between — say — western music, Arab music and native African music, we cannot assume that Greek music was typical of all ancient music. It is no good studying a stringed instrument, however. Although Sir Leonard Woolley speculated that the figures on the bases of the harps he found in the Death Pits of Ur indicated the overall tone of the instrument (a bull‘s head intimated a bass harp, a ram‘s head one with a higher pitch, and so on) the exact notes produced by a harp or fiddle depend on how tightly the strings are stretched — and that is something which it is impossible to recreate with any certainty.
Wind instruments, on the other hand, are fixed at the moment of creation. The basic sound a flute produces depends solely on the length of the instrument and the individual notes are dependant on the finger holes drilled in the side. (As any recorder player knows, different fingering produces different notes, but in less sophisticated instruments there is a direct correlation between the holes and the notes, one finger, one note.) Pan pipes are even simpler to study, for there the notes are determined purely by the length of the individual pipes.
What Mr Lawson has found is that while the ancient instruments basically followed the western scale, there are some sutble differences, sounds not dissimilar to the "bent" notes so beloved of blues players. He is able to get some nice music out of his copy of an 800-year old bone flute from Norwich, for example, but when compared to the notes on a piano, he says that it is "really playing in the cracks" between notes.
Interestingly enough, some of the instruments appear to have a tuning that is very similar to that of Scottish bagpipes. If true, it can only have been bad news for Paleolithic music lovers. A friend of mine had two daughters who were both learning the bagpipes and it was their anti-social habit to rehearse before going to school in the morning. To be woken in a winter's dawn by their attempts to practise a pibroch or stumble their way through a reel was guaranteed to set one's nerves on edge for the rest of the day.
Mr Lawson is also attempting to analyse patterns of wear around the finger-holes on the ancient flutes. He hopes that this will give him an insight into the notes most commonly used. As a musician myself, I wish him luck. A statistical analysis of Beethoven‘s Fifth, showing that it contains 1,246 Cs and 7,341 Bs isn‘t really going to get you very close to the magic of the composer's genius. About all he may learn is whether the ancient musicians slid their fingers over the holes rather than lifting them up and down: finger sliding is a technique used to produce "bent" notes.
It gives one a whole new insight into antiquity to picture some Neolithic caveman staring out at the driving rain from the mouth of his bijou residence and crooning the Mastadon Blues to himself; "Well, I woke up this morning ..."
seating squaws In case you haven't heard this hoary old parody of Pythagoras' theorum, "The square on the hypotenuse is equal to the sums of the squares on the other two sides", here it is.
A Red Indian chieftan had three wives and to give them somewhere to sit in the mud and snow of north America, he presented them with animal skins. Squaw no. 3 received a bear skin, squaw no. 2 got a moose hide, but his favourite, squaw no. 1, received a hippopotamus hide obtained at vast expense from the paleface traders.
Unfortunately there was a good deal of jealousy between the three wives and one day squaws 2 and 3 egged their sons on to attack the favourite. She, however, was brawny as well as beautiful and in short order knocked the two sons around to such an extent that they were glad to run bawling back to their mothers, thus proving that the squaw on the hippopotamus is equal to the sons of the squaws on the other two hides. Return
