Questions of the Day  What advances did Metallurgy create?  What was the first metal to be worked?  What kinds of instruments did the early Egyptians have?  How was music used in Egyptian culture?  What do we know about Egyptian dancing?

BRIEF HISTORY OF METALLURGY  No substance has been as important as metal in the story of man's control of his environment.  The age of copper: from 7000 BC  From about 7000 BC a few neolithic communities begin hammering copper into crude knives and sickles, which work as well as their stone equivalents and last far longer.  Certain kinds of bright blue or green stones are attractive enough to collect for their own sake. It turns out that when such stones are heated to a high temperature, liquid metal flows from them. They are azurite and malachite, two of the ores of copper.

 Sometimes the ores of copper and tin are found together, and the casting of metal from such natural alloys may have provided the accident for the next step forward in metallurgy. It is discovered that these two metals, cast as one substance, are harder than either metal on its own.  The age of bronze: from 2800 BC  A bronze blade will take a sharper edge than copper and will hold it longer. And bronze ornaments and vessels can be cast for a wide variety of purposes.

Musical instruments  Egyptian musical instruments were well developed and varied. They included string instruments such as harps, lyres, lutes, percussion instruments like drums, rattles, tambourines, bells (first used during the Late Period) and cymbals (Roman Period), wind instruments like flutes, clarinets, double pipes, trumpets, and oboes.

Hathor

Mizmar

Sistrum

Double Flute

Tuts’s Trumpet

Singing  tombs inscriptions of songs can be found, hymns sung to the accompaniment of a harp. These Harpers' songs praised the dead and death, keeping the name of the deceased alive by repeating it.

One such inscription:  How firm you are in your seat of eternity,  Your monument of everlastingness!  It is filled with offerings of food,  It contains every good thing.  Your ka is with you,  It does not leave you,  O Royal Seal-bearer, Great Steward, Nebankh!  Yours is the sweet breath of the north wind!  So says his singer who keeps his name alive,  The honorable singer Tjeniaa, whom he loved,  Who sings to his ka every day.

DANCE  Unfortunately, apart from a number of depictions, little is known about ancient Egyptian dancing.  Egyptian choreography appears to have been complex. Dances could be mimetic, expressive - similar to modern ballet with pirouettes and the like, or gymnastic, including splits, cartwheels, and backbends.

Questions of the day.  What advances did Metallurgy create?  What was the first metal to be worked?  What kinds of instruments did the early Egyptians have?  How was music used in Egyptian culture?

Note book assignment.  Study!  quiz tomorrow.  What is on the quiz?  What format is the quiz?  Review?