L'art du qānûn egyptien

Ancient music refers to the musical practices of the literate civilizations of antiquity (e.g., Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece, Rome, the Levant, Persia, India, and China) before the medieval period. It is largely monophonic, text-driven, and modal, and survives today through a small corpus of notated fragments, theoretical treatises, iconography, and instrument remains. Its sound world is characterized by modal pitch systems (e.g., ancient Greek harmoniai built from tetrachords), rhythm tied to poetic meter, and timbres from lyres, harps, auloi (double-reed pipes), flutes, rattles/sistra, frame drums, and early lutes. Because authentic performance practice must be reconstructed, modern revivals rely on scholarship in archaeology, philology, and organology as much as on musical craft.

Ancient Egyptian music refers to the soundworld and performance practices of Egypt from the Early Dynastic and Old Kingdom periods through the Ptolemaic era (ca. 3000–30 BCE). It was integral to ritual, kingship, festivals, funerary rites, banquets, and daily life. Iconography and texts show ensembles of singers, dancers, and instrumentalists serving temples and courts, as well as professional entertainers in domestic feasts. Characteristic instruments include arched and angular harps, lyres, long‑necked lutes (introduced later from the Levant), end‑blown flutes and double pipes, double‑reed pipes, natural trumpets, frame and goblet drums, hand clappers, and two emblematic ritual rattles: the sistrum and the menat. Textures were largely monophonic or heterophonic with drones, and rhythm was strongly cyclic. While no definitive notation survives, melodic practice was likely modal, with small intervals, stepwise motion, and ornamental inflection guided by voice and instrument.