hi david- you sound like one busy guy. some while ago i became
fascinated with the mesopotamian bull-headed lyre (sometimes
referred to as a harp). i started to do alot of thinking about how
these things would have been tuned and used. they must have played
a big part in their religious observances. i thought maybe there
could be a correlation between the strings and the planets- those
wanderers whose wayward travails were noted by the chaldean
astrologers for eons. needless to say, it did make sense to me to
assign a string to each of the deities in the babylonian cosmology.
but that's too simple. it is rather hard to second guess these pre-
alphabetic cultures because their brains were wired a bit
differently than the way that ours have evolved. egypt is
especially tough- not only for its thousands of years of history
(think of the u.s.of a. at a mere 230 years) but also for the myriad
of gods and goddesses that evolved in their cosmology along with
their writing- first hieroglyphics and then hieratics (still no
alphabet, though, that was a development of the hebrews once they
had fled egypt for the 'promised' land). but what is fathomable is
their grasp of geometry. pythagoras didn't discover proportion and
mean- he merely borrowed it from the egyptians. i'm going to dig
through my archives and find some things to send you that might help
with the egyptian harp. no music, unfortunately, but other material
that might help to put their geometry in harmonic terms. i'm piqued
by the mention of the andalusian stuff- is there a time frame for
this? any of us who assay the world of early music seem to start
somewhere in the medieval times, after the 'dark' ages. it is
interesting to note, that by this time people were becoming literate-
the various alphabets of the romance languages were acquiring their
present recognizable state. most of us deal in these patriarchal,
linear cultures. those who wish to pursue anything earlier really
need to find a new paradigm of musical thought- good luck!
gregory