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The 'aulos' in the Ure Museum is the best known example of a popular musical instrument from ancient Greece. Although it looks like a flute, our single pipe was actually half of a double aulos, a wind instrument played by blowing through a reed. Blowing air through one reed to make noise on two pipes would have been hard work, resulting in red faced boys with puffed up cheeks and some ancient written sources tell us it caused people to make fun of each other. Our aulos, which seems to have a wooden core, encased in bronze and silver, has been mistakenly restored as a single aulos. The Ure Museum bought it in 1967 for £100 and it was perhaps undervalued because it was so rare and people were suspicious of its restoration. Reading's Classics Department, however, had on staff an expert in ancient music, Dr. John Landels, who advised the Ure's Curator, Annie Ure, of its value. He studied it using x-ray technology and concluded that most of the materials were original. Bone, ivory and wooden parts of similar instruments have been found in excavations in Greece and the Mediterranean but the metal parts have usually disappeared, degraded beyond recognition, or weren't used on some pipes