ORIGIN OF THE HARP
Central Asian Discoveries
The Homiman Museum in London has the biggfest collection of musical instruments in Britain. Recently its assistant curator, Mrs Jean Jenkins, made a trip to Central Asia to continue her special study of the harp, and on her return spoke in a 8.8. C. broadcast about her research and various recordings she had made. "The origin of the harp is still obscure,” Mrs Jenkins said, “but you find it on rock carvings a thousand years did, in India, even though it doesn’t exist there today. The Burmese still use one, a very. elegant instrument with silk strings and silk tassels, gilded and decorated with mica. And on the other side of the Pakistan border, the Afghans still use a very primitive bow harp.” In the Hominjan Museum there was a harp from the late 18th century from as far west as the Caucasus, Mrs Jenkins said, but there was nothing in books or museums in Western Europe to indicate whether the instrument had originated in Central Asia, or perhaps spread from ' China through Central Asia to Persia. Again and again in her researches she had come up against the blank spot of Central Asia, and had therefore decided to go there in search of the lost harp. “It was a thrilling experience and a rewarding one,” said Mrs Jenkins, “for at last I found parts of the missing link. Imagine my joy when, in Samarkand, I discovered a first-century fresco of a woman harp-player, and at Airtam, also in Uzbekistan, a stone frieze, 2000 years old, showing three musicians, one of whom is playing a harp. I also saw illustrated manuscripts from the time of Tamerlaine—-the 14th century —that show the harp was a popular instrument then.
“The harp was carried along the trade routes to the outskirts of Tameirlaine’s empire in both directions, east into Chinese Turkistan and as far west as the Caucasus. And in the Caucasus it was still played until a hundred years ago,” she said.
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Press, Volume XCIX, Issue 29278, 9 August 1960, Page 11
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337ORIGIN OF THE HARP Press, Volume XCIX, Issue 29278, 9 August 1960, Page 11
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