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Engel, C - Ancient Egyptian music and healing
Identifier
007304
Type of Spiritual Experience
Background
A description of the experience
Musical Myths and Facts Volume II 1876 – C. Engel
The ancient Egyptians, at an early period, had attained a considerably higher stage of development in the cultivation of music than many nations of the present day have achieved.
This assertion will not appear exaggerated to any musician who has carefully examined the ancient representations of the variously constructed instruments which were in use with the Egyptians, centuries before our Christian era. Equally suggestive is a statement of Herodotus, indicating the progress which the Egyptians had made in the healing art, nearly 500 years before our era. He remarks (Euterpe 84)
‘The art of medicine is thus divided amongst them; each physician applies himself to one disease only, and not more. All places abound in physicians; some physicians are for the eyes, others for the head, others for the teeth, others for the parts about the belly and others for internal disorders’.
Such a high degree of cultivation of an art or science in which each professor occupies himself especially with a particular branch in order to achieve the utmost possible perfection in it, is known at the present day only among the civilised nations
