A Popular History of the Art of Music

ed until they pass out of the view of history as a nation, when the sacrificial fires went out in the great temple at Jerusalem on the 11th of July, A.D. 70, and the heathen Roman defiled the altars of God. In the beginning Genesis tells us of one Jubal, who was the father of such as handle the harp and the organ (kinnor and ugabh-the little triangular harp of Assyria, and the shepherd's pipe, which here stands for all sorts of wind instruments). In the course of the centuries the harp changed its form somewhat, and perha

pointed by David. According to Josephus, this great number was vastly increased in still later times, the numbers given being 200,000 trumpeters and 40,000 harpers and

emple service, and this again was hung upon the willows of Babylon. The name kinnor is said to have been Ph?nician, a fact which points to this as the source of its derivation. It is not easy to see how this could well be, unless we regard the name as having been applied to the invention of Jubal at a later time, for Jubal lived many years anterior to the founding of the great metropolis

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posed to be this instrument, but none of them satisfactorily, at least not authoritatively. It was probably a variety of harp. The nebel is also said to have been a psaltery, but its etymology points to the Ph?nici

mentations and for certain festivals, as in Isaiah xxx, 29: "Ye shall have a song as in the night when a holy solemnity i

are merely blunders of the Septuagint translators, who rendered the word kinnor by about si

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d. Nevertheless when he sang and danced before the ark his wife despised him in her heart. Miriam, the sister of Moses, may well have been a professional musician, one of the singing and dancing women, such as are represented over and over again in the monuments. In the time of Moses, and for some time later, wo

Fig. 8. It may have been something like one which was found in Egypt, but the form is clearly Assyrian,

hey heard in the very sonorous words of David, Moses, Isaiah and Ezekiel, with all the subtle suggestion of a vernacular as employed by minds of the

Lord's, and the

d they that

founded it u

shed it upo

nd into the hi

stand in His

ppose that the whole choir of Levites made answe

es in periodically, as, for instance, in the one: "O give thanks un

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ularly gifted people did not attain a place of commanding influence upon the tonal side of music, it nevertheless has borne no small part in affording a vantage ground for later art in the line of noble conceptions, inspiring motives and brilliant suggestions. It has been, and still is, one of the most pote

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fe. Among the discoveries at Nineveh and Babylon are many of a musical character. Strong bearded men are playing upon

ing figure we have the banjo-like instrument so

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ayed by means of a hammer. Many have considered these to have been the original type of the modern instruments

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ccasions. We have no idea what the effect of this music can have been, but upon the tonal side it cannot have had any great resonance or power.