Page:The story of the flute (IA storyofflute1914fitz).djvu/47

 Transverse flutes were known to the Chinese and to the Japanese from time immemorial, and Dr. Lea Southgate considers that probably the European transverse flute is derived from the Chinese Tsche, but he gives no evidence in support of this startling theory. In India also the instrument was certainly known at a very early period. Some carvings of the god Krishna (to whom the natives attribute the invention of the flute) on the eastern gateway of Sanchi Tope in Madras, and various ancient monuments in Buddist Temples in Central India, dating about 50, contain representations of transverse flutes. It is depicted on the Tope of Amaravati (now in the British Museum), which dates from the first century.

I can find no substantial evidence of the existence of transverse flutes in Europe till the tenth and eleventh centuries. Such instruments are portrayed on some ivory caskets of the tenth century Early in the National Museum at Florence, also in some Greek MSS. of the same date in the Bibliotheque National in Paris, and in an illuminated Byzantime MS. of the eleventh century in the British Museum. There is in the oldest portion of the Cathedral of Kieff, in Russia, a picture stated to have been painted early in the eleventh century, which includes a transverse flute. We find pictures of transverse flutes in Hortus Deliciarum, written in the twelfth century by Herrade de Landsberg, Abbess of Hohenbourg, and in the Codex