The Great Egyptian Music Mystery

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New York, 1937. A set of strange manuscripts come to light. They're covered in a series of coloured circles of different sizes and arrangements, along with inscriptions in Coptic Egyptian saying things like ‘Spiritual Symphony’, and ‘Sacred Hymn Singer’. An Egyptologist at the Metropolitan Museum of Art verifies them, and they're identified as the only known examples of Ancient Egyptian musical notation. For some, this was the vital piece in a jigsaw they'd been puzzling over for decades. We know there was a vibrant musical culture in Ancient Egypt: musical instruments have been unearthed in tombs, and wall paintings depict unmistakable scenes of musicians performing in all kinds of settings. But nobody knew what the music being played in the scenes sounded like. For others, the manuscripts pointed towards a kind of mysticism of music, built around a close connection between tone and colour, and leading ultimately to the cosmic harmonies of the music of the spheres, the ancient idea that the bodies of the solar system make music as they revolve through the heavens. Cultural historian and Radio 3 New Generation Thinker Ellie Chan unravels the mystery, investigating what these mysterious manuscripts have meant to various people over the years, and asking what sense we can make of them today. Producer: Luke Mulhall