As a basis for our studies, we have developed database applications with desktop frontends for rapid data entry and linking. One of these manages the over 200 wind-instrument fragments found in Queen Amanishakheto’s tomb in Meroë, Sudan, now in Boston, as well as 48 pieces from the Oxus temple, now in Dushanbe. In several study sessions, we have documented the items, combining measurements with various photographic, photogrammetric, X-ray and spectroscopic data as well as technical drawings. This required enhancing our software for physical modelling of instrumental pitches and perfecting its interface for producing 3D-printed models, so that it is now also possible to produce working models of ancient mechanisms. Experiments with printed instruments thus lead to a first reconstruction in original materials (Peter Holmes), which was exhibited along the originals at the MFA, Boston, and finally of two complex instruments (Marco Sciascia). As a point of comparison for the Oxus find, we collaborated with music archaeologist Chrēstos Terzēs on the interpretation of two bone instruments with bronze sliders found at Megara, also leading to a playable reconstruction.
In another strand of the project, we evaluated Al-Fārābī’s comments on the construction and tuning of woodwind instruments, and how these relate to lute scales, carefully examining his terminology in the context of Aristotelean philosophy. In order to make Al-Fārābī’s enormous compendium searchable and prepare a translation as well as a better critical edition of crucial parts, we digitised the latest edition and procured digital images of the known manuscripts.
Complementary to the study of Early Islamicate texts on lutes, we re-evaluated published Egyptian lutes from the late antique and early Byzantine periods. This also involved the creation of new software, modelling the pitches of strings of different diameter and material on a fretted board more accurately, and thus predicting optimal placements for the (lost) bridges; an exemplary evaluation of the best-studied instruments both confirmed and improved upon earlier interpretations.
When we found our project schedule shattered by the COVID pandemic, we preliminarily had to obtain measurements for the Oxus find from photographs and drawings, with the invaluable support of Gunvor Lindström, expert on the archaeology of the site. Working from such secondary data involved tedious procedures of quality management, which we facilitated by developing novel software interfaces that allow to experimentally assemble fragments, highlight possible joins or even search for physically plausible configurations of longer sections. In this way, we arrived at a first musical interpretation, starting from an extraordinary instrument section assembled of two concentric bone cylinders. These formed a hitherto unknown type of mechanism, which appears to present the first archaeological corroboration for a musical system that had been reconstructed mainly from literary sources only twenty years ago.
Then we could resume our travels, and at the end of our project, boxes of loose fragments had come together to almost complete (Boston) or partially complete (Dushanbe) pipes, some of them over a metre long. This will not only allow exhibiting them in a proper form; above all, it finally allowed us to assess their tonality. Surprisingly, all studied instruments aligned themselves with the known facts and tenets of ancient ‘Greek’ music, with distinct links to instruments from the Hellenistic and Roman periods we had also studied. Both Central Asia, with its history of rich Hellenistic kingdoms in the aftermath of Alexander's conquest, and even the African kingdom of Kush (the ancient ‘Ethiopia’) thus appear to have participated in Hellenistic music culture.
A different strand of music, physically relying on equally spaced fingerholes or lute frets, could be traced from Antiquity to the early Islamic period. Remaining almost unrecognised in Greek sources, it surfaces in certain instrument finds, from Sumerian and Pharaonic Egyptian doublepipes through late antique lutes. In contrast, the lute (‘ud) that formed the backbone of Arabic music theory was still largely diatonic; our research has suggested that this four-strings-four-frets instrument, which gained unprecedented popularity at the period, variants being played everywhere from Spain to Japan, may ultimately derive from a design that is first attested on a Greek monument.
All in all, a picture of widely shared musical practices emerged, largely expressed in a diatonic framework based on tuning in fifths and fourths, as attested in second-millennium BCE Mesopotamia as well as in Warring-States China and Classical Greece. Within the outreach of distinctly Hellenistic culture, however, music was additionally coloured by sequences of semitones (‘chromatic’) or quartertones (‘enharmonic’): we have found material evidence for all three ‘genera’. Scales with ‘neutral thirds’, on the other hand, which ancient Greek theory would have rejected outright, were evidently old, but never truly recognised before medieval times.
