The Aquincum organ

In the mid-third century AD, the guild house of the fire brigade in the Civil Town of Aquincum, the antique predecessor of Budapest, was consumed by a fire that proved impossible to extinguish. The floor of one its rooms with a cellar underneath collapsed and the room’s furnishings tumbled into the cellar. Although the building itself was rebuilt some time later, the rubble in the cellar was left as it was. The artefacts lay buried deep in the ground until 1931, when the construction of an electricity transformer house was begun. Lajos Nagy conducted an excavation in the area of the planned building, during which he discovered fragments of bronze organ pipes in the cellar of the one-time guild house. Working late into the night by moonlight, he brought to light the remains of the world’s oldest organ. 
The new volume in the Aquincum Pocket Guides series presents this unique find, the water organ of Aquincum. The description of the organ’s findspot and its eventful fate is followed by a detailed discussion of the organ’s mechanism from its winding system to the organ pipes, alongside portraits of the known organ players of ancient Greece and Rome, and a section on when and where organ music was played in Antiquity, which include some quite surprising occasions and locations.