Note {136} — HOMERIC HYMNS
Reading edition
In our illustration both the lyre with a tortoise shell for sounding-board, and the cithara, with no such sounding-board, are represented. Is it possible that “the tuneful shell” was primarily used without chords, as an instrument for drumming upon? The drum, variously made, is the primitive musical instrument, and it is doubted whether any stringed instrument existed among native American races. But drawings in ancient Aztec MSS. (as Mr. Morse has recently observed) show the musician using a kind of drum made of a tortoise-shell, and some students have (probably with too much fancy) recognised a figure with a tortoise-shell fitted with chords, in Aztec MSS. It is possible enough that the early Greeks used the shell as a sort of drum, before some inventor (Hermes, in the Hymn) added chords and developed a stringed instrument. Cf. p. 39.