Ancient Egyptian Music and Africans

1655 Words7 Pages
Brandon Pilcher MUS 13 AF Professor Jeff Kaiser The African Origin of Ancient Egyptian Music Although our African Music course attempted to cover all the continent’s major regions in its first unit, including the Sahara Desert in the north, it nonetheless omitted one major area of Northeast Africa that I would have preferred to see explored: the Egyptian Nile Valley. Even our textbook says barely a word on Egyptian music from any time period and none at all on its pre-Islamic, pre-Arabic stages (what we commonly call the “Ancient Egyptian” period). I presume this was because the musicology department at UCSD classifies ancient Egypt not as a “true” African culture but as a Near Eastern one, the same policy as the History Department (notice the one Ancient Egyptian course is sorted under Near Eastern rather than African history). I object to this classification. I submit that ancient Egyptian music shares many parallels with that played throughout so-called “traditional” Africa, both in instrumentation and in musical style. Furthermore, I shall propose the possibility that these parallels between Egypt and the rest of the African continent reflect not simply technological diffusion from the former to the latter, but instead can be traced to a common pan-African cultural root. In other words, not only did the Egyptians resemble Africans in certain cultural respects, they were themselves an African people. I shall start with the instrument toolkit. The musical instruments available in ancient Egypt can be sorted into three main categories: wind, string, and percussion. Wind instruments produce sound when you blow through them, string instruments when you strike a string attached to them, and percussion instruments when you beat them. The first category of wind instruments in the Egyptian repertoire were the flutes, which the Egyptians would carve from reeds.

More about Ancient Egyptian Music and Africans

Open Document