Bagpipes are woodwind instruments using enclosed reeds fed from a constant reservoir of air in the form of a bag. The Scottish Great Highland bagpipes are the best-known examples in the Anglophone world, but people have played bagpipes for centuries throughout large parts of Europe, Northern Africa, Western Asia, around the Persian Gulf, and northern parts of South Asia.
History
The evidence for bagpipes before the 13th century AD is still uncertain, but several textual and visual clues have been suggested. The Oxford History of Music posits that a sculpture of bagpipes has been found on a Hittite slab at Eu yuk in Anatolia, dated to 1000 BC. Several authors identify the ancient Greek askaulos (ἀσκός asks — wine-skin, αὐλός aulos — reed pipe) with the bagpipe. In the 2nd century AD, Suetonius described the Roman emperor Nero as a player of the tibia utricular. Dio Chrysostom wrote in the 1st century of a contemporary sovereign (possibly Nero) who could play a pipe (tibia, Roman reedpipes similar to Greek and Etruscan instruments) with his mouth as well as by tucking a bladder beneath his armpit.
In the early part of the second millennium, the representation of bagpipes began to appear with frequency in Western European art and iconography. The Cantigas de Santa Maria, written in Galician-Portuguese and compiled in Castile in the mid-13th century, depicts several types of bagpipes. Several illustrations of bagpipes also appear in the Chronique dite de Baudoin d’Avesnes, a 13th-century manuscript of northern French origin. Although evidence of bagpipes in the British Isles before the 14th century is contested, they are explicitly mentioned in The Canterbury Tales (written around 1380)
A bagpipe well code he blowe and down, /And there-with-al he brought us out of town.