What Instruments appear on Coins in the Ancient World?
Coins are an important source of information for music archaeologists. They may be small but the skill of the ancient die maker who makes the two dies which contain the impression of the two sides of the coin was amazing. There are hundreds of different images on...
When is a Lur not a Lur
When the great, curved Bronze-Age horns were found in Scandinavia and the Baltic Region, no-one knew how old they were or what they might have been called. This was in the days before C. J. Thomsen developed the idea of the three-age system, calling periods, the Stone...
When did the Trumpet and Keyboard First Get Together?
We can’t say exactly when these two instruments first came to be played together but it certainly didn’t take long after Ktesibios invented the first keyboard instrument. He was a Greek inventor and mathematician who lived in Alexandria, Ptolemaic Egypt. He made all...
Enjoying the Craic:The Irish Horns
One of the highlights of the Bronze-Age brass is the Irish Horns, over one hundred instruments which were found all over Ireland. They’ve been turning up for over a hundred years, popping up out of bogs unexpectedly. None have been dug up in organised excavations so...
