Europe's oldest and longest-lived musical traditions for which evidence survives, pipes made from wing-bones of large birds, stretch back almost 30,000 years from recent folk-musics to finds from Old Stone Age caves.
The picture is still very incomplete, and no doubt many aspects of such music will always elude research - not least, song and dance. However, enough remains to show the importance of music here, as elsewhere around the ancient world.
The earliest European instruments are by no means the simplest. Bronze Age horns and trumpets found in Irish and Danish bogs are such sophisticated feats of engineering that they are difficult to duplicate even today.
Imperial Rome and its successors possessed sophisticated stringed instruments to compare with the most advanced anywhere at that time.
Music accompanied ritual, military operations and public spectacles, as well as more intimate domestic entertainment, from the houses of common people to the courts of Germanic kings and the tented encampments of nomad horsemen.
