a reference on musical scales from usenet

the following is excerpted from this post from a very laborious and contentious thread on the rec.music.makers.piano newsgroup. I do not know what his source is, but for my reference:

"Greek music theory derives from Egyptian and Mesopotamian predecessors, which were developed to account for heptatonic music.

We know what the instruments of the time were like. Flutes, auloi and lyres were all designed for 7-note scales. We have a Sumerian description of a tuning algorithm for a heptatonic harp and we know of some subtle refinements of design like auloi that came in two pieces so you could mix and match upper and lower tetrachords from different modes (exactly the way makams are conceptualized in the Middle Eastern music theory of the present day). There is not one surviving physical artifact or description of an instrument that suggests the ancient world used pentatonic scales.

> and the Japanese took a different direction

They didn't. They borrowed the Chinese pentatonic scale from China,
as a late development. "

D'ailleurs la théorie traitant de la construction de gammes diatonique et pentatonique me dépasse. Je n'en sais qu'on y distingue une construction historique, voire une évolution de pratiques, et d'autres basées sur des modèlizations conceptuelles de la génération de notes (tons) de musique, dont le cercle de quintes la série harmonique, et les systèmes de tempérament à intervales mesurées sont les exemples les plus connus auprè les non-spécialistes.