Two Religions, One Rattling Frame, Three Thousand Years Apart

The sistrum's basic design, a metal frame on a handle strung with loose discs or bars that rattle against each other when shaken, was already old in ancient Egypt, where it was closely associated with the goddess Hathor and appears in temple reliefs held by priestesses and by royal women performing rites in her honor; the instrument's rattling sound was understood within that cult as pleasing and appeasing to the goddess and to other deities by extension. That specific religious history is Ancient Egyptian Religion's to tell in full.

What is notable from the far side of the timeline is that the same basic instrument, under the name tsenatsil, remains in active liturgical use today, three thousand years later and in a religion with no doctrinal connection to Hathor at all: the Ethiopian and Eritrean Orthodox Tewahedo churches, whose deacons and cantors shake the tsenatsil, usually alongside drums and prayer staffs, during the sung portions of the liturgy. Scholars generally treat the continuity of the physical instrument, rather than any claimed continuity of belief, as the connecting thread, an unusually direct material survival of an object from one religious world into an entirely different one.