At that time (the beginning of the eighteenth dynasty, 1500-2000 B.C.) Egypt was just recovering from her five hundred years of bondage, and music must already have reached a wonderful state of development.  In wall paintings of the eighteenth dynasty we see flutes, double flutes, and harps of all sizes, from the small one carried in the hand, to the great harps, almost seven feet high, with twenty-one strings; the never-failing sistrum (a kind of rattle); kitharas, the ancestors of our modern guitars; lutes and lyres, the very first in the line of instruments culminating in the modern piano.

One hesitates to class the trumpets of the Egyptians in the same category, for they were war instruments, the tone of which was probably always forced, for Herodotus says that they sounded like the braying of a donkey.  The fact that the cheeks of the trumpeter were reinforced with leather straps would further indicate that the instruments were used only for loud signalling.

According to the mural paintings and sculptures in the tombs of the Egyptians, all these instruments were played together, and accompanied the voice.  It has long been maintained that harmony was unknown to the ancients because of the mathematical measurement of sounds.  This might be plausible for strings, but pipes could be cut to any size.  The positions of the hands of the executants on the harps and lyres, as well as the use of short and long pipes, make it appear probable that something of what we call harmony was known to the Egyptians.

We must also consider that their paintings and sculptures were eminently symbolic.  When one carves an explanation in hard granite it is apt to be done in shorthand, as it were.  Thus, a tree meant a forest, a prisoner meant a whole army; therefore, two sculptured harpists or flute players may stand for twenty or two hundred.  Athenaeus, who lived at the end of the second and beginning of the third century, A.D., speaks of orchestras of six hundred in Ptolemy Philadelphus’s time (300 B.C.), and says that three hundred of the players were harpers, in which number he probably includes players on other stringed instruments, such as lutes and lyres.  It is therefore to be inferred that the other three hundred played wind and percussion instruments.  This is an additional reason for conjecturing that they used chords in their music; for six hundred players, not to count the singers, would hardly play entirely in unison or in octaves.  The very nature of the harp is chordal, and the sculptures always depict the performer playing with both hands, the fingers being more or less outstretched.  That the music must have been of a deep, sonorous character, we may gather from the great size of the harps and the thickness of their strings.  As for the flutes, they also are pictured as being very long; therefore they must have been low in pitch.  The reed pipes, judging from the pictures and sculptures, were no higher in pitch than our oboes, of which the highest note is D and E above the treble staff.