Heh I dunno,

bag pipes have existed accross all the connected continents for a very long time: Africa, Europe, Asia. Their popularity seems to have come and gone. It seems to me unlikely that the Celts had much to do with the original creation and spread of bagpipes, simply because I suspect the instruments were around most places before the Celts were. I don't know how one could figure this out for sure though.

About five or maybe more years ago, there was an article in a science magazing, perhaps "Nature" magazine, about a neanderthal site that had large mammoth or mastodon tusks that had been bored hollow and with holes along the side. These were supposedly made to be some kind of musical instrument that would have taken two people to play, and were possibly part of a very very large bag pipe, or some kind of flute.

my understanding is that bagpipes originated from somewhere in Persia about
a 1000 years ago or so. They were the folk instrument from the 1300s-1700s.
ubiquitous everywhere in Europe, Eastern Europe and Asia.

I've been told that about 3000 years ago in the middle east..... picture this - A man in the desert carving on a bone of an animal. He hallows it out and cuts holes along one side until he figures out that you can make some really cool tones by blowing through it. Well, he's jamming with his drumming buddies and everything is cool but he cannot maintain the sound because he keeps running out of breath. He then gets the bright idea that if he attaches a goats stomach to one end of the bone and blows into it, it buys him enough time to take a breath without losing air pressure. You can actually squeeze the bladder enough to provide a few seconds of air while you breath or even rest. Hence a bladder pipe is born.....the precursor to bagged pipes. They also taught themselves circular breathing. The Irish and Scottish added drones....

To my knowledge the bladder pipe is the first bagpipe and they have been found in the middle east roughly 3000 years ago. Of course they are virtually unusable..... ;-)

my $.02

servus,

DROGO

I've actually done the research on this, and the answer is an amazing piece of archaeology, music history, and culture.

Imagine neolithic (Copper age) people, like Oetzi (The famed Ice-man corpse found in the Alps), walking around hunting. They naturally have a fire-making kit of flint and flamables, a bag of herbs, and possibly a duck call. The duck call, a small tube into which one blows, to produce a duck-like sound, is a piece of technology that has not changed in over 10,000 years. If you look at archaeological specimens of ancient duck calls, you will note one striking thing -- they were made just like Drone reeds on a bagpipe. Neolithic people were using reeds as duck calls at least 10,000 years ago, and the basic design of those duck calls remained unchanged until only very recently. That basic design is of a cane reed blocked on one end with a tongue cut out.

By 10,000 years ago, flutes had been a long-established common musical instrument. Even Neanderthals made flutes out of animal bones. It is not unreasonable to assume that neolithic people figured out that longer reeds made lower-pitched quacks than shorter reeds, and applied what they already knew about making flutes to the first reed instruments. Small shawms or clarinet-like instruments that use drone-reed like reeds have been around at least 5,000 years. The ancient greeks had reed instruments that used both drone-reed style reeds as well as double-reeds (like in a modern chanter) at least 5000 years ago. These were instruments like the Aulos, a double-chantered flute-like double-reed instrument -- available in a quiet version with reeds similar to a practice chanter, and a large military version that armies marched with. This large version of the aulos had a double reed that is essentially the same type and loudness as a modern bagpipe double-reed. They had to blow so hard to play the large aulos, that they developed a special harness of leather to proteect the cheeks of the players from being over-stressed. If you look at ancient Greek art from about 3500 BC, you see many depictions of people playing these instruments with these leather straps on their faces.

Related to the bagpipe's development is an archaeological find from 5,000 years ago, of a bellows-driven instrument found in Turkey, which many called an ancestor of the bagpipe. This was not really the case. The instrument was actually a pipe-organ, and is more likely the ancestor of the Roman-era water-organ. It was actually a bellows-driven instrument with a series of fipple-flute pipes of different lengths, arranged like a pipe-organ. Though not an ancestor of the bagpipe, it showed that bladders and bellows were used for music instruments at that point.

It was about the same time (about 3500 BC) that someone in either Persia or the far east developed the first bladder-pipe, which allowed the player to play continuously without stopping the music to beath. The bladder-pipe was essentially a double-reed chanter-like instrument with a sheep's bladder tied on the chanter, and a mouthpiece on the other end of the bladder. The bladder works essentially the same as a bagpipe bag, but on a smaller scale. Interestingly, the oldest bladder pipes had the exact same 8-hole arrangement found on most wind instruments until the baroque period, and the oldest ones play the same
myxolidian scale that bagpipes do today.

Somewhere between 3500BC and 3000, the first actual bagpipes were invented in the middle-east. The pipes were a double-chanter design, with an arrangement of notes similar to that of the Aulos. There were no drones on these instruments, and the chanters were usually made of animal bone, and occaisionally brass. Animal horns were usually placed on the ends of the chanters. The modern Mezoued, (in Turkey, it's known as the Zurka) made in Tunesia, bears an almost exact resemblence to it's ancient ancestor. The Greeks took this instrument and developed a similar double-chanter instrument, but made it mostly out of wood. Occaisionally, the chanters were joined at the ends into a single-horn. You can still buy "mediterranean" bagpipes that are made this way, though their sound is probably very different from their ancient ancestor. They usually do not have drones.

The Romans, shortly after, took this double-chanter design, and added a drone to it. They called this instrument the Utriculus, and The Roman Emperor Nero lamented about it's sound -- he had to play it as a "punishment" for losing a bet at a game. Roman legions, connecting with their Greek forefathers, marched to the sounds of several Utriculus players, along with trumpets or Corni. The Utriculus made it all the way to England, as several archaeological finds turned up in Marwood and there are depictions of them in post-roman architectural sculptures.

All along, there were single-chanter bagpipes right along side the double-chanter pipes. Bagpipes and bladder pipes sort of had a parallel life, along with shawms. Some time (it's not really known when) after the development of the utriculus, pipes resembling modern bagpipes began to show up -- the single-chanter with a single drone arrangement can be seen in dozens of pieces of art from the late Roman era. There are a couple of mosaics and paintings in Alexandria, Egypt that date back to the Roman era, which show single-chanter bagpipes being played. The single-drone arrangement was used in both smallpipes and loud pipes for centuries. It was rare to see more than one drone until the middle ages. During the renaissance, you could occaisionally see 2 drones.

Highland pipes got the 3rd drone about 1650, and most experts agree that the 3rd drone was not common until that time, although, there are legends in various writings of pipers with as much as 14 drones on bagpipes (the 14-drone pipes were a french musette, which modern shuttle-pipes are based on, with several cylenders containing multiple drones, which the inventor apparently made as a dare to other pipers -- in the story, he challenges pipers to try blowing the pipes to keep all the drones working, because apparently, it was extremely hard. If real, these pipes would have likely have not been reproduced, since they were so difficult to play), but the average is 2. Highland pipes, and a few British variants are the only bagpipes that regularly come with 3 drones. Most of the other ethnic varieties have only one or two drones.