Oldest wooden flute in Europe... so far.

Irish Flute
1

It takes ages to come across this sort of information, so it would seem a shame not to write it down and share it. This is the oldest “definitely a wooden flute” found in Europe so far, as far as I know. It is an unusual topic to research, with not much compiled…there is not much evidence left of early wooden flutes.

a. is from the pdf linked below, courtesy G.S. Schöble


b. is reproductions for sale.

c. and bottom picture is from Sri Lanka 1800s from British museum. I include the last because it is uncannily similar in designs and Sri Lankans are descended from Indo Europeans it would seem. Maybe people just scratch designs like that when given the opportunity though ?


The original was found in a lake that is now in Germany, from about 1000 BC. Both are end blown I think…or not , my German is not that good to understand

https://www.pfahlbauten.de/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/FlotenfragmentHagnauBurgBodenseekreis.pdf

which is on the find and reproducing it. I expect wooden flutes of some kind were being used much earlier also, but just did not last.

2

The bone ones survived better. Search for the ones found in the Wood Quay excavation in Dublin. Or the one from Germany.

3

There are no tone holes, is that right, just the embouchure hole? I wonder if this would qualify as a musical instrument in that case. Maybe more of a signaling device like a modern referee’s whistle?

4

That would be largely true of the ethnic Sinhalese and their language, but - not to nitpick - remember that Sri Lanka has a number of long-established minorities, the largest of which would be the Tamils, who are Dravidian - definitely not an Indo-European group. It would be hard to draw accurate flute assumptions on the basis of majority ethnicity alone in a land where, like India too, cross-cultural borrowings would not be unusual, and the question is: From whom? Same goes for decorative patterning: you might find something similar anywhere in the world at given times. The makers of such an old flute may well have predated Indo-European influence, which is all the more likely since said flute is something like 500 years older than that, according to present linguistic models. Inconclusive at that time scale, perhaps, but it counsels caution in making speculative cultural attributions.

There’s one tonehole. It’s an end-blown (I believe notched?) flute.

5

There is a nice collection of information on flute history here:

https://www.flutopedia.com/flute_timeline.htm

6

Can’t wait till it’s listed on ebay!

7

Hmmm… I’m still wondering if it’s something we’d consider a musical instrument if it can only hit two pitched notes. To me that sounds like it might be something like a bird call, or some other signaling device. There is a much older history of bone flutes with multiple tone holes suggesting a musical intent.

Then again, who am I to judge what ancient cultures might consider music. :confused:

8

Hey, Conical. Do I have to remind you about “Johnny One Note”?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9mUZSUxCFCQ&ab_channel=MichaelC.

9

cough overtones.

10

Yeah, but if you only have two notes to start with, there aren’t going to be many overtones to play with!

11

With only two positions on my Iberian three-hole flute (say o-o-o and o-o-x, right being the thumb) I can get a handful of notes. I don’t see why a one-hole flute couldn’t get close to a full pentatonic scale.

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_trumpet
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overtone_flute

But … these are long, narrow-bore instruments. The original flute doesn’t look suitable for as many overtones.

13

On my tiny Generation G whistle I can get eight distinct notes only ever uncovering the bottom hole. Even four or six notes are rather more than “it’s only get one hole so it can only make two notes.”

I doubt if anyone knows or could know whether that flute was used for music, but it’s not unreasonable to say that it might have been.

Edited: /s/unfeasible/unreasonable


PS. And if I stick my little finger over the bottom end I can make all sorts of noises …

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https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=c6T6suvnhco

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=YcGZfVehez0


Not just ancient people could make music with only one note. So can modern people! First video is Francis Bebey and the second are Pygmy musicians. Very very cool stuff! Check out other songs by Francis Bebey where he uses the same flute.

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They are bone, I know, but check them out. Have holes and they can be played.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_TqOqgA5_Ik

16

Heh heh, Mr. Bebey invites you to step outside your (musical) box.

It would be a fun experiment to take a few great musicians/improvisers/composers and give them something like that instrument, nothing else, and see what they would come up with. I imagine Stevie Wonder wouldn’t struggle for even a moment, while others would be hard pressed to come up with a way to musically use such a “limited” instrument. Bach probably wouldn’t have minded it so much, lol.

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RE: Sri Lanka, by the 1800s it had had a continuous European presence for 3 decades. Before that, it was very well-connected to much of the rest of Eurasia for millennia, and has been quite cosmopolitan and diverse for much of its history, stretching back thousands of years. All of this to say that there’s a tendency to view cultures and folk musics as somewhat stagnant or drawing upon primeval sources (like possible shared Indo-European heritage), when the reality that everything is in constant flux, with influences coming and going.

In the case of that flute, especially given that it has a six-hole layout much like the European simple-system flute, I’d imagine that the design is an adaptation of indigenous Sri Lankan bamboo flutemaking to some European influence. I’d actually be willing to bet that, given the decoration, lack of wear, and the fact that this came from the personal collection of a British colonial official with an interest in studying the local culture, this flute was made specifically for him, possibly as mainly a ceremonial/decorative piece. A quick glance at the British Museum’s other Sri Lankan flutes (they have a remarkable collection of other people’s stuff over there!) from the same collection show a split between nicely preserved decorated ones (with intricate patterns like this one) and rougher-looking, completely undecorated ones, which were likely “players’ instruments.”

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@ Nanohedron.

“Absolutely” , and unfortunately the museum page did not say exactly which culture it came from

https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/object/A_As1898-0703-1630

I don’t draw assumptions though, I just don’t remember seeing any other flutes with that kind of triangular design and banding , though surely there will be others? What I notice though is that there are really quite strong tendencies in design and art, and that they tend to be deeply ingrained in whatever culture. For example the only other obvious crosshatching and diagonals which I know of that is representative of a culture is the likes of

https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Victor-Goncalves-4/publication/288653432/figure/fig3/AS:667695913648131@1536202519220/Placa-de-xisto-da-Anta-do-Curral-da-Antinha-1-a-face-e-o-verso-da-placa-da-Anta-Grande.ppm

Which are from this area of Portugal around 2500 BC… and maybe why the design caught my attention in first place. Still, even if this sort of design was ancient European, it still is possible Indo-Europeans emulated it and took it with them…the whole subject is very much an “amaginarium” for hypothesis.


For the linguistics and Indo European migration and so on, it is an area of great academic debate and argument, Johnnie Galacher gives an overview here (only first part of video, rest is question)

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=2ikS5Ta4BR4

In reality it is not clear the extent and timeframe of all the different cultures and people’s of the time. In now Germany, some models say late neolithic Indo European presence for example.

I don’t know, and tend to observe from the sidelines :slight_smile: .

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@ Mr. Grumby

Yes, there are some very old bone flutes, the oldest ones are all bone…right the way back to if they are not sure if they are toneholes or woolly hyena (?) bitemarks . Though they give a lot of clues I don’t have much affinity for them… I just always imagine they were being played… well… by the butcher :frowning: (no offence to butchers meant at all or in any way whatsoever at all at all at all)

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@ Conical bore

A bronze age referee whistle, oh dear :slight_smile: .


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If it was a flute or not I think just rests on whether it had a fipple or was end/side blown. What use it served is something else though, I think music for the fact it is decorated? So I went to look up overtone flutes and miniature flutes, and these are different perspectives offered, remembering that it is about 15cm long only after all:


A miniature Japanese pipe flute plays a song

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=kKw-v_qkSiQ

A koyok is similar, here making bird sounds I think


https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=_Qr6-Gpm6II


A koudi flute… this one has toneholes but it is to show the range of pitch possible on such a small instrument.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=m2NqEqVKQW4

What I wonder on the one from the lake is if the end blown part might also be able to be covered or part covered and the flute blown via tonehole .


@ xabeba and ecadre

Thanks, I was wondering if it was possible at all to get overtones on such a small instrument.

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Overtone flutes are longer usually, but not everyone is familiar with them so I’ll just post some representative links.


How to make a traditional one from willow bark

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=eSrXDZdwihU

A tutorial that gives an idea of sounds

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=0e47JpKHBm8

What goes on in the forests of eastern Europe

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=QPby01qNro8



Just have to figure out now how flute playing three thousand years ago ended up as trad. Shouldn’t be too hard but I think I will go and do a bit of sanding and leave that to others :slight_smile:

19

Hugh Neville

“Editor of the Taprobanian (a local cultural affairs journal) and a local civil administrator, Nevill was a great collector of material of all kinds from Sri Lanka (bronzes, manuscripts, stone, etc). His collection, made between c. 1865 and 1897) is spread across the BM, BL and V&A. Hugh Nevill compiled his collection of Sinhalese manuscripts, now in the Oriental and India Office Collections of The British Library, while working as a civil servant in Sri Lanka between 1869 and 1888. It is impressively wide-ranging, with manuscripts on a wealth of subjects, from poetry to medicine to Sinhalese ritualistic poetry with, 19 volumes of bound paper manuscripts,containing the texts of the two major cycles of ritualistic legends in Sri Lanka”


I don’t think he was collecting tourist knicknacks. I also think it’s a bit unfair to assume nice looking instruments with 6 toneholes came from or were for the west…and the locals played rustic poorer versions only ? Pre “discovery” north American flutes also had 6 toneholes, for example.

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I didn’t say either of those things. It’s just that, in general, if you’ve got two sets of instruments, one group with relatively little wear and lots of decoration, and one in decidedly more worn and with little to no decoration, one conclusion you can draw is that there was a bit of a split between the instruments that got played a lot and the ones that didn’t. It’s not unique to this situation at all; think of all the flutes played by great Irish fluters that were held together with hose clips!

As for flutes in pre-Columbian North America, there are relatively few surviving specimens and I have yet to see one that closely matches the layout of the European six-hole simple system flute, certainly not as much as the flute you linked does. I have yet to see them all, of course, so I can’t say for certain. I’d honestly be very surprised if somewhere, sometime, some flute maker in North America didn’t make it that way, even just as an experiment. I can say that saying that they “had 6 toneholes” as some kind of rule is completely ahistorical. The Breckenridge flute, for example, has four holes. If you want to include Mesoamerica as well I think I’ve seen some tlapitzalli examples with six holes, but no one is going to confuse them for a Western flute!

Mainly, my post was intended to point out that we don’t need to think back nearly as far as the proto-Indo-Europeans to explain similarities in flute styles between Europe and Sri Lanka. And that’s not even getting into convergent evolution. When you get down to it there are only so many ways the laws of physics will allow you to get noise by blowing into or around a tube, so flutes will end up with some similarities!