Books › The story of the violin, 1904 › scan 46
Scan 46
The story of the violin, 1904
14 lines. Read by computer on 3 September 2026. No printed page number was found. See the scan on archive.org.
1Family Likeness
3long ago, or who could have been this Ravana, King of Leuka?
5Tradition says, five thousand years before our era he invented his instrument. This is a startlingly long time. Even if we were disposed to discount a liberal portion as compound interest on a small initial mistake made in the counting by the descendants of this Ceylonian king, it would launch us into the dimmest dim of prehistoric times—as regards India at least. Unlike her two great sister nations in antiquity, Egypt
7
9FIG. 1.—INDIAN SARINDA.
11and Chaldea (which had then already raised and buried several civilisations), India has no documentary record of herself as a nation prior to about 2000 B.C., when the hymns of the Rig Veda, the oldest of the four sacred books of the Brahmins, are supposed to have been composed. To speculate, therefore, on a king who lived, say, some three thousand years before Christ, not to mention such a period as five thousand years, would seem useless labour.
13It appears to me significant, however, that tradition
The computer misreads some letters and numbers. Where a name matters to you, read the scan.