Ngoc Lu

Archaeology finds

The argument over what the bronze drum was for starts from a scene engraved on the face of the Ngoc Lu drum: a group of people gathered around objects shaped like drums. The archaeologist Pham Huy Thong read it as a scene of drumming, and wrote that whatever else the Dong Son drum may have been used for, it was a drum to begin with, a musical, percussion instrument. The researcher Ta Duc went further: this was drumming in the manner of husking rice, with a long pestle driven straight down from above, and he cited the Muong language in support. That reading became a stage number — a troupe standing and pounding bronze drums at the Hung Kings temple festival, a number the composer Duong Dinh Minh Son points out dates only from 1979.¹

Professor Phan Dang Nhat objects by way of the drum’s own decoration. The Ngoc Lu drum carries a real rice-husking scene: the mortar set on the ground, two people standing, both hands on a long pestle thrust straight down. But the scene people call drumming is quite different — most of the figures in it are sitting, their arms reaching forward. His argument is this: if the ancients had meant to engrave a scene of pounding drums, they would have engraved the very husking posture they had just engraved elsewhere. Who is right is unsettled, but this is a live scholarly argument, with specific names and specific reasons.¹