To delve backward from this point is not so easy as it looks, yet however far back we may choose to go we cannot fail to find evidences that assemblies of instruments were employed, sometimes to accompany voices and again to play independently.
The antiquity of music at banquets, for example, is attested by sayings as old as Solomon, by bitter comments of Plato, by the account of Xenophon and by passages in the comedies of Aristophanes.

The instrumental music at banquets in Plato's time was that of Greek girl flute players and harpers.

Early in the Middle Ages the banquet music consisted of any collection of instruments that chanced to be at hand.
In an ancient manuscript in the National Library of Paris there is a picture of Heinrich of Meissen, the minnesinger (born 1260), conducting a choir of singers and instrumental performers.

The instruments are viols and wooden wind instruments of the schalmei family.

A bas relief in the church of St.Gregory at Boscherville in Normandy shows an orchestra of several players.