Story of the Flute
upper end and held sideways, which are never depicted with a lateral mouth-hole, and never have the end of the tube protruding beyond the mouth of the player.
Ward, in his Word on the Flute, citing Hawkins, mentions an engraving of a tesselated pavement in a temple of Fortuna Virilis at Rome, built by Sylla (c. 78 B.C.), in which he says there is a representation of a player with a transverse pipe "exactly corresponding with the German flute"; and Montfaucon, in his L'Antiquité Expliqueé gives two copies of bas-reliefs of a similar kind. Kircher (1650) also represents transverse flutes as known to the Egyptians many centuries before Christ. But the correctness of these statements and the accuracy of the copyist are extremely doubtful. In the case of ancient statues (such as The Piping Faun) the flute with a lateral mouth-hole is probably invariably a modern restoration. There is, however, in the British Museum a fragmentary flute found by Sir Charles Newton in a tomb at Halicarnassus, and one of the fragments has what certainly appears to be a side-blown mouth-hole cut in a wedge-like excrescence, beyond which the tube (of ivory) projects. But no undoubted and complete specimen of a real transverse side-blown flute, or absolutely authentic contemporary representation of such an instrument, has ever been found among the numerous relics of the ancient Greeks, Romans, or Egyptians. If the transverse flute was known in pre-Christian Europe, it certainly disappeared completely for many centuries.
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