The Europeans added frets to the oud and called it a " lute" - this derives from the Arabic " Al'ud" (literally "the wood"), via the Spanish name " laud".Ī lute or oud is defined as a "short-necked instrument with many strings, a large pear-shaped body with highly vaulted back, and an elaborate, sharply angled peghead".Ĭlick on the picture to go to Art's website. The tanbur had taken another line of development in the Arabian countries, changing in its proportions and remaining fretless. The oldest known iconographical representation of an instrument displaying all the essential features of a guitar is a stone carving at Alaca Huyuk in Turkey, of a 3300 year old Hittite "guitar" with "a long fretted neck, flat top, probably flat back, and with strikingly incurved sides". Kasha defines a guitar as having "a long, fretted neck, flat wooden soundboard, ribs, and a flat back, most often with incurved sides". What is a guitar, anyway? To distinguish guitars from other members of the tanbur family, we need to define what a guitar is. It can be seen today at the Archaeological Museum in Cairo. The soundbox was made of beautifully polished cedarwood and had a rawhide "soundboard". Har-Moses instrument had three strings and a plectrum suspended from the neck by a cord. Sen-Mut (who, it is suspected, was far more than just chief minister and architect to the queen) built Hatshepsuts beautiful mortuary temple, which stands on the banks of the Nile to this day. He was buried with his tanbur close to the tomb of his employer, Sen-Mut, architect to Queen Hatshepsut, who was crowned in 1503 BCE. The oldest preserved guitar-like instrumentĪt 3500 years old, this is the ultimate vintage guitar! It belonged to the Egyptian singer Har-Mose. Many of these instruments have survived into modern times in almost unchanged form, as witness the folk instruments of the region like the Turkish saz, Balkan tamburitsa, Iranian setar, Afghan panchtar and Greek bouzouki. Tomb paintings and stone carvings in Egypt testify to the fact that harps and tanburs (together with flutes and percussion instruments) were being played in ensemble 3500 - 4000 years ago.Īrchaeologists have also found many similar relics in the ruins of the ancient Persian and Mesopotamian cultures. The tanbur probably developed from the bowl harp as the neck was straightened out to allow the string/s to be pressed down to create more notes. "Queen Shub-Ad's harp" (from the Royal Cemetery in Ur)Ī tanbur is defined as "a long-necked stringed instrument with a small egg- or pear-shaped body, with an arched or round back, usually with a soundboard of wood or hide, and a long, straight neck". Around 2500 - 2000 CE more advanced harps, such as the opulently carved 11-stringed instrument with gold decoration found in Queen Shub-Ad's tomb, started to appear. The world's museums contain many such "harps" from the ancient Sumerian, Babylonian, and Egyptian civilisations. Since prehistory people have made bowl harps using tortoise shells and calabashes as resonators, with a bent stick for a neck and one or more gut or silk strings. The Ancestors The earliest stringed instruments known to archaeologists are bowl harps and tanburs. He surmises that the Greeks hellenified the old Persian name for a 4-stringed instrument, "chartar". Kasha turns the question around and asks where the Greeks got the name "kithara", and points out that the earliest Greek kitharas had only 4 strings when they were introduced from abroad. It would also be passing strange if a square-framed seven-string lap harp had given its name to the early Spanish 4-string "quitarra". It is hard to imagine how the guitar could have evolved from the kithara, which was a completely different type of instrument - namely a square-framed lap harp, or "lyre". The sole "evidence" for the kithara theory is the similarity between the greek word "kithara" and the Spanish word "quitarra". The influence in the opposite direction is undeniable, however - the guitar's immediate forefathers were a major influence on the development of the fretted lute from the fretless oud which the Moors brought with them to to Spain. He showed that the lute is a result of a separate line of development, sharing common ancestors with the guitar, but having had no influence on its evolution.
Michael Kasha in the 1960's showed these claims to be without merit. It has often been claimed that the guitar is a development of the lute, or even of the ancient Greek kithara.
Many theories have been advanced about the instrument's ancestry. The guitar is an ancient and noble instrument, whose history can be traced back over 4000 years. A Brief History of the Guitar Back to Handbook
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