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vertically by the top corner and touch or sweep with the right hand.222 |
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What seems to be a later cognate of the same instrument starts to appear on Apulian vases about 360 BC, and is then seen on several hundred of them. They show an object that resembles a small ladder, except that the rungs (six to twenty in number) are two or three times too close together, and each rung has a blobby excrescence in the middle. The thing is mainly associated with women, Aphrodite, and Eros. It is perhaps 60 cm. long by 18 cm. wide. It is clearly some sort of musical instrument: in several cases it appears beside lyres and harps, and in one painting a woman, seated and facing another woman who dances, is holding it up by one corner with her left hand while touching the 'rungs' with her right, which is spread out with fingers extended.223 It is as if she were sweeping across strings, but they cannot be strings: they are too short, they are all the same length, they have the attachments in the middle, and there is no sign of a soundbox. Perplexed scholars have often called the instrument a xylophone. But a xylophone would have bars graded in length to give different notes, and it would need to be struck with a hammer, not riffled over with the bare fingers. Others use the designation 'Apulian sistrum', which is more appropriate. Sistrum (Greek seistron) means a rattle,224 and the problematic object can only have given voice by rattling or jingling. Presumably the 'rungs' of the |
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222 British Museum 118179; R. D. Barnett, The Nimrud Ivories (London, 1957), 78-9, 191. pl. 16-17; Rimmer, 40, pl. VIIb; Aign 158: Zancani Montuoro 34f. and pl. XIV. It had usually been taken as a small zither (Sachs, HMI 118; Rimmer), but on a rectangular zither we should expect to see the strings parallel to the long axis, not at right angles to it. The same instrument is represented in two or three terracottas from Kharayeb (Lebanon) of about the 3rd C. BC (M. H. Chéhab, Bull. Mus. Beyrouth 10 (1951-2), 38; 11 (1953-4), pl XLII-XLIII). A 5th-c. inscribed bone tablet from the Orphic community in Olbia has on its verso a curious design which could be taken as a drawing of the instrument under discussion; see my The Orphic Poems, 17 and 19. |
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223 See Pl. 33; Wegner, Musikleben, 66f., 229, pl. 24; Bilder, 110f.; G. Schneider-Herrmann in Festoen, Festschrift A. Zadoks-Josephus Jitta (Leiden, 1976), 517-26 and Bulletin Antieke Beschaving 52-3 (1977-8), 265f.; A.D. Trendall and A. Cambitoglou, The Red-Figured Vases of Apulia, i (Oxford, 1978), 315f.; E. Keuls, AJArch. 83 (1979). 476f.; Paquette, 206, 214f.; Maas-Snyder, 190 fig. 2b, 196 fig. 16; A.M. Di Giulio in Gentili-Pretagostini, 113-17. I mention as a curiosity J. G. Landels's suggestion in CR 29 (1979). 132 that the object is 'a knitting machine or a hair-waver'. |
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224 It is applied especially to the rattle traditionally used in the Egyptian cult of Isis, which consisted of a metal frame on a handle with loose rods crossing it. See Sachs, HMI 169 f., 89f.; Dar.-Sag. iv. 1355-7; NG xvii. 354. |
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