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gem depicting an elderly satyr who sits in a pose recalling Rodin's Thinker. Behind him is a tree, from which hang a panpipe and a bagpipe. The latter has two chanters and a bass drone, all flared at the end. It looks as if this may have been a mouth-blown bagpipe, but the inflating arrangements are not clear.117 |
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Then there are three figurines from late Ptolemaic Egypt, each depicting a man in Syrian dress who is playing or preparing to play two (if not three) instruments at once. In his left hand he holds a panpipe. Under his left arm he holds an inflated skin bag, into the end of which is fixed a pipe that extends to his right hand. In at least one of the figurines the pipe is clearly marked with finger-holes. In anotherthe only one where the feet are not broken offthe man's right foot presses down on a clapper, or more probably a bellows supplying the bag with air. In this figurine he is assisted by a naked boy or dwarf, who also treads down on the pedal while at the same time clashing a small pair of cymbals together.118 The bagpipe represented in these models is of a very basic design, inflated by bellows, not by a blowpipe, and with a single exit-pipe which could function either as a chanter or as a drone accompanying the melody of the panpipe. It can be compared in the latter respect with the native Indian bagpipe, which has only one exit-pipe, the finger-holes of which are often stopped up with wax so that it becomes a drone accompanying another instrument. The Indian bagpipe, however, is mouth-blown. Bellows-blown bagpipes are most characteristic of eastern Europe, though also found in France, northern England and lowland Scotland, and Ireland. |
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Nero, ever eager to display his artistic talents, performed publicly on a bagpipe, rather to the amusement of his empire. Dio Chrysostom refers to his competence at piping both with his mouth (that is, with ordinary auloi) and by the method of putting a bag under his arm to avoid the uncomely distortion of the face that normal piping involves. Clearly his bagpipe, like that of the Syrian one-man band, |
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117 See Pl. 28; J. Boardman, Engraved Gems: The Ionides Collection (London, 1968), 21 f., 93, and pl. 16; Antiquity 43 (1969), pl. XLVb. Professor Boardman tells me that the gem is 'more likely to be earlier than the first century BC than not', but that these gems are 'horribly difficult to date'. |
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118 This one is illustrated in Sachs, HMI, facing p. 144, though he (143) erroneously took the bag to be joined up with the panpipe to make a sort of organ; and in Baines, Bagpipes, 65; Collinson, The Bagpipe, facing p. 28; all three in H. Hickmann, Musikgeschichte in Bildern, ii. 1: Ägypten (Leipzig, 1961), 95, and in Antiquity 43 (1969), pl. XLIV-XLV, where there is also a possible fourth example from Roman Gloucester (Collinson, Antiquity 43, 305-8). |
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