Ask Lemmy

Hi. Egyptian here. And no. The music you generally hear that’s being attributed to that period is just the sensationalised Hollywood vision of what I would have been like.

What you’ll usually come across is Arabian music, not Egyptian. It’s not the pharaonic style, which I assume is what you’re asking about. It would be more akin to Coptic music.

Another missing criteria is that many instruments emerged in different eras, over thousands of years, so there’s that too.

I think the most important instruments that should be the oldest and seem ubiquitous are the Darboka (also called Tabla in present day Egypt) and the Ney.

I don’t think I’ve ever come across an Egyptian that doesn’t love the sound of the Ney on a primal level. This is what it sounds like: https://youtu.be/wYQ_ol3L9Ag

And this is the closest/most-faithful rendition of a real song that makes sense that I’ve ever come across in the wild: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ntnBuQAvFjA (by Peter Pringle)

There are also some renditions of real songs like this one: https://youtu.be/0TJR_l-uSVo

Unfortunately, I can’t enthusiastically recommend this one as an authentic example, because while the lyrics are historically real, rhe rendition is still not faithful, because they didn’t exclusively use period-appropriate instruments.

I think there are also some other examples from the recent Grand Egyptian Museum opening ceremony (at least I heard someone say that, but aren’t sure because I didn’t watch it personally)

I wouldn’t recommend those as reference material because they’re essentially promotional material designed to captivate tourists, and with a healthy side-serving of propaganda for the Egyptian audience (hence why I opted out of watching that).