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The Technical Development Of The Oboe As Shown Through The Literature Of The Instrument From The Eighteenth Century To The Present, Janet A. Degroote

University of the Pacific Theses and Dissertations

In a brief survey of this history of the oboe, it is necessary to return to primitive instruments. It is impossible to give a definite date at which the oboe may have originated, but Schwartz, in this Story of Musical Instruments, accepts the periond of the Fourth Dynasty in Egypt, or about 3700 B.C., as the date of the oldest specimens of the early forms.¹ We also know of their existence in the Mesopotamian culture of 2800 B.C. A shrill, double-reed instructment with some finger-holes is known to have exited in Greece about 1500 B.C., when that civilization was …