Rejected Series: Banquet scene, Lacquer painting on Lute Belly, Shōsōin

c.800-999, Banquet scene from hunting tableau, lacquer painting on belly of lute, Shōsōin, Nara.

This is presented as plate 13 in Werner Bachmann's The Origins of Bowing and discussed on pages 52-53¹. Bachmann says:

The painting, representing a hunting scene, decorates the sounding-board of a valuable lute (p'i-p'a) preserved in the Shōsōin, the treasure-house at Nara. In the central part, the artist has portrayed a banquet (Plate 13). Between two musicians, squatting on the floor, sits the host, to whom a servant is offering food, and in the right foreground is his guest. One of the two musicians holds a large lute, the strings of which he plucks with a plectrum. The second, as far as one can judge, is playing a slender, long-necked, bowed instrument, propped up on the floor. The bowed instrument answers the description of the rabāb in al-Fārābī's treatise on music, which specifically mentions the great similarity in construction between the rabāb and the long necked lute of Central Asia - the Khurāsān tunbūr. Unfortunately, the evidence of this illustration is by no means incontrovertible. Even from the special enlargement in my possession it is impossible to determine whether or not the object is in fact a musical instrument at all. Whereas the artist responsible for the lacquer painting has reproduced the details of the p'i-p'a with considerable accuracy, the object interpreted as a bowed instrument is treated somewhat casually. Did he wish to imply by this that the instrument in question was a crude, imperfect folk instrument, or did he have no really clear idea of how it looked, having seen it only briefly? Or is it, perhaps, not a musical instrument after all? No source material has yet been found which might give a definite answer to these questions; and we must therefore content ourselves with the hypothesis that this painting may represent one of the earliest illustrations of a bowed instrument. One thing is, however, certain, namely that the illustration originated in Central Asia; and the position in which the instrument is played is illuminating, since it corroborates evidence gleaned from other medieval Eastern sources, and applies to folk instruments widely used today in Turkestan and Uzbekistan. All the various types of bowed instruments native to Central Asia are played in the same position - a gamba - as for instance the aforesaid Chinese lute from the T'ang period (plate 13 [this image]. Apart from the ghichak (gydjak), which resembles the Arab Kamanja, the bowed chordophones of the Central Asia states of today are outwardly similar to the narrow, long necked fiddle shown in this early illustration. In the view of the unchanging, age-old traditions of this region, the agreement between historical sources and ethnological material is of special interest. When the construction and performing technique of these modern Central Asian bowed instruments are studied, it is easier to interpret and understand the earliest known pictorial representations of bowed chordophones, and valuable conclusions follow regarding the origins of bowing.