The south face of the Helicon: Ancient Egyptian musical elements in Ancient Greek music

Abstract

The work offers a preliminary study about Egyptian influence on Greek music from the Archaic and Classical Periods to encourage future work in this field among researchers. We will focus our attention in the aesthetic and intellectual aspects of these musical traditions. In this way, we will talk about Egyptian and Greek concepts of music, the character of their musical traditions through a textual and iconographic analysis, and the question of Egypt as a musical reference for ancient Greece. We demonstrate with our study how the Egyptian influence on Greek music was very profound before the Ptolemaic Period.