Lyre

The earliest reference to the word "lyre" is the Mycenaean Greek ru-ra-ta-e, meaning "lyrists" and written in the Linear B script. In classical Greek, the word "lyre" could either refer specifically to an amateur instrument, which is a smaller version of the professional cithara and eastern-Aegean barbiton, or "lyre" can refer generally to all three instruments as a family. The English word comes via Latin from the Greek. ==Classification==

Hornbostel–Sachs classifies the lyre as a member of the lute-family of instruments which is one of the families under the chordophone classification of instruments. Hornbostel–Sachs divide lyres into two groups, Bowl lyres (321.21) and Box lyres (321.22). In organology, a lyre is considered a yoke lute, since it is a lute in which the strings are attached to a yoke that lies in the same plane as the sound table, and consists of two arms and a crossbar. ==Ancient lyres==

There is evidence of the development of many forms of lyres from the period 2700 BCE through 700 BCE. Lyres from the ancient world are divided by scholars into two separate groups, the eastern lyres and the western lyres, which are defined by patterns of geography and chronology. The lyres of Ur are bull lyres excavated in ancient Mesopotamia (modern Iraq), which date to 2500 BCE and are considered to be the world's oldest surviving stringed instruments. However, older pictorial evidence of bull lyres exist in other parts of Mesopotamia and Elam, including Susa. During the Iron Age, Megiddo was a royal city in the Kingdom of Israel. Thin lyres are a type of flat-based eastern lyre with a thinner soundbox where the sound hole is created by leaving the base of the resonator open. The earliest known example of the thin lyre dates to c. 2500 BCE in Syria. After this, examples of the thin lyre can be found throughout the Fertile Crescent. The thin lyre is the only one of the ancient eastern lyres that is still used in instrument design today among current practitioners of the instrument. As a means of support, players of the thin lyre wear a sling around the left wrist which is also attached to the base of the lyre's right arm. It is played using a plectrum or pic to strike the strings; a technique later used by the Greeks on the western lyres. and associated with a type of lyre depicted in Israelite imagery, particularly the Bar Kochba coins. and modern luthiers have created reproduction lyres of the "kinnor" based on this imagery. Giant lyres Giant lyres are a type of flat-based eastern lyre of immense size that typically required two players. Played from a standing position, the instrument stood taller than the instrumentalists. The oldest extent example of the instrument was found in the ancient city of Uruk in what is present day Iraq, and dates to c. 2500 BCE. Well preserved giant lyres dating to c. 1600 BCE have been found in Anatolia. The instrument reached the height of its popularity in Ancient Egypt during the reign of Pharaoh Akhenaten (c. 1353—1336 BCE). A giant lyre found in the ancient city of Susa (c. 2500 BCE) is suspected to have been played by only a single instrumentalist, and giant lyres in Egypt dating from the Hellenistic period most likely also required only a single player. Phorminx Kitharis Barbitos ==Cultural use in Ancient Greece==

, ). Shows strap that stabilizes instrument. Musician holds a plectrum in his other hand. In Ancient Greece, recitations of lyric poetry were accompanied by lyre playing. The earliest picture of a Greek lyre appears in the famous sarcophagus of Hagia Triada (a Minoan settlement in Crete). The sarcophagus was used during the Mycenaean occupation of Crete (). The lyre of classical antiquity was ordinarily played by being strummed like a guitar or a zither, rather than being plucked with the fingers as with a harp. A pick called a plectrum was held in one hand, while the fingers of the free hand silenced the unwanted strings. Construction A classical lyre has a hollow body or sound-chest (also known as soundbox or resonator), which in Greek tradition was anciently made out of a turtle shell. Extending from this sound-chest are two raised arms, which are sometimes hollow, and are curved both outward and forward. They are connected near the top by a crossbar or yoke. An additional crossbar, fixed to the sound-chest, makes the bridge, which transmits the vibrations of the strings. The deepest note was that closest to the player's body; since the strings did not differ much in length, more weight may have been gained for the deeper notes by thicker strings, as in the violin and similar modern instruments, or they were tuned by having a slacker tension. The strings were of gut (animal intestines). They were stretched between the yoke and bridge, or to a tailpiece below the bridge. There were two ways of tuning: One was to fasten the strings to pegs that might be turned, while the other was to change the placement of the string on the crossbar; it is likely that, as expedient, both methods were used simultaneously. Some of the cultures using and developing the lyre were the Aeolian and Ionian Greek colonies on the coasts of Asia (ancient Asia Minor, modern day Turkey) bordering the Lydian empire. Some mythic masters like Musaeus, and Thamyris were believed to have been born in Thrace, another place of extensive Greek colonization. The name kissar (cithara) given by the ancient Greeks to Egyptian box instruments reveals the apparent similarities recognized by Greeks themselves. The cultural peak of ancient Egypt, and thus the possible age of the earliest instruments of this type, predates the 5th century classic Greece. This indicates the possibility that the lyre might have existed in one of Greece's neighboring countries, either Thrace, Lydia, or Egypt, and was introduced into Greece at pre-classic times. ==Central and Northern European lyres==

:See Rotte (lyre) Other instruments known as lyres have been fashioned and used in Europe outside the Greco-Roman world since at least the Iron Age. Lyres are depicted on ceramic and bronze vessels of the Proto-Celtic Hallstatt culture across central Europe. Among them there are lyres with rounded bottoms, stringed instruments whose resonators seem to be missing and lyres with strongly curved yokes and single or double bulging resonators. In 1988, a stone bust from the 2nd or 1st century BCE was discovered in Brittany, France which depicts a figure wearing a torc playing a seven-string lyre. The Germanic lyre is representative of a separate strand of lyre development. Appearing in warrior graves of the first millennium CE, these lyres differ from the lyres of the Mediterranean antiquity, by a long, shallow and broadly rectangular shape, with a hollow soundbox curving at the base, and two hollow arms connected across the top by an integrated crossbar or ‘yoke. Famous examples include the lyre from the ship burial at Sutton Hoo, and the decayed lyre discovered in silhouette at the Prittlewell royal Anglo-Saxon burial in Essex. The waterlogged lyre recovered from a grave at Trossingen, Germany, in 2001 is the best-preserved example found so far. ==Bowed lyres==

Some instruments called "lyres" were played with a bow in Europe and parts of the Middle East, namely the Arabic rebab and its descendants, including the Byzantine lyra. After the bow made its way into Europe from the Middle-East, it was applied to several species of those lyres that were small enough to make bowing practical. The dates of origin and other evolutionary details of the European bowed lyres continue to be disputed among organologists, but there is general agreement that none of them were the ancestors of modern orchestral bowed stringed instruments, as once was thought. There came to be two different kinds of bowed European lyres: those with fingerboards, and those without. The last surviving examples of instruments within the latter class were the Scandinavian talharpa and the Finnish jouhikko. Different tones could be obtained from a single bowed string by pressing the fingernails of the player's left hand against various points along the string to fret the string. The last of the bowed lyres with a fingerboard was the "modern" () Welsh crwth. It had several predecessors both in the British Isles and in Continental Europe. Pitch was changed on individual strings by pressing the string firmly against the fingerboard with the fingertips. Like a violin, this method shortened the vibrating length of the string to produce higher tones, while releasing the finger gave the string a greater vibrating length, thereby producing a tone lower in pitch. This is the principle on which the modern violin and guitar work. File:Britannica Bow Earliest Crémaillère Type.png|12th century A.D. Carolingian Empire. Bowed round lyre on the Lothair Psalter. Engraving lacks fine details in the original, such as the mechanism to adjust the tension of the bow. File:Musicians with bowed lyre, psaltery, monchord, and dancers, from the Psalterium cum Canticis ('Werdener Psalter') Berlin, Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin – Preußischer Kulturbesitz, Ms. theol. lat. fol. 561.png|1029-1050 A.D., Germany. Werner Psalter. Bowed Germanic lure (far left) File:Asaph playing bowed lyre, Winchcombe Psalter, Cambridge University Library, Ff.1.23, folio 4v.jpg|1025-1050, England. Asaph playing bowed lyre, detail from Winchcombe Psalter, Cambridge University Library, Ff.1.23, folio 4v File:Bowed lyre from, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek Munchen, BSB, CLM 2599, folio 96v.jpg|Early 13th century A.D., Aldersbach, Germany. Bowed lyre without fingerboard from, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek Munchen, BSB, CLM 2599, folio 96v. File:Bowed lyre, from Simonovskaya Psalter, State Historical Museum, Moscow.jpg|13th century, Russia. Bowed lyre, from Simonovskaya Psalter, State Historical Museum, Moscow ==Modern lyres==

The term is also used metaphorically to refer to the work or skill of a poet, as in Shelley's "Make me thy lyre, even as the forest is" or Byron's "I wish to tune my quivering lyre, / To deeds of fame, and notes of fire". ==Other instruments called "lyres"==

Over time, the name in the wider Hellenic space came to be used to label mostly bowed lutes such as the Byzantine lyra, the Pontic lyra, the Constantinopolitan lyra, the Cretan lyra, the lira da braccio, the Calabrian lira, the lijerica, the lyra viol, the lirone. ==Global variants and parallels==

;Europe • Armenia: քնար (knar) • British Isles: Scotland cruit, The Shetland Isles gue and Wales crwth • England: Anglo-Saxon Lyre, giga, rote or crowd • Continental Europe: Germanic or Anglo-Saxon lyre (hearpe), rotte or crotte • Estonia: talharpa • Finland: jouhikko • Greece: λύρα (lýra; Modern Greek pronunciation: líra) with the subtypes of Politiki lyra ("Constantinopolitan lyre"), Cretan lyra and Pontic lyra ("lyre of the Black Sea", also known as kemençe) • Italy: the Latin chorus, the modern Calabrian lira • Lithuania: lyra • Norway: giga, Kraviklyra • Poland: lira • Russia: Lyre-shaped gusli ;Asia • Arabian peninsula: tanbūra • Iran: chang romi • Iraq (Sumer): tanbūra, zami, zinar • Israel: kinnor • India and Pakistan: tanpura • Kazakhstan: kossaz • Siberia: nares-jux • Yemen: tanbūra, simsimiyya ;Africa • Egypt: kissar, tanbūra, simsimiyya • Ethiopia and Eritrea: begena, dita, krar • Kenya: kibugander, litungu, nyatiti, obokano • Sudan: kissar, tanbūra • Uganda: endongo, ntongoli File:Vyap Saung.jpg|Burmese lyre, a Byat saung. File:Carl Haag A Nubian harper.jpg|Tanbūra In Cairo, played by a Nubian, 1858. File:African Lyre Player c. 1640-1660, Deccan, at the Cleveland Museum of Art.jpg|Lyre Player c. 1640–1660, Deccan sultanates File:Ntongoli (Bowl Lyre), Aloni Kagya, 1968 (cropped).png|alt=Picture of a 1960s Ntongoli (Bowl Lyre) from St. Cecilia's Hall, Edinburgh|Picture of a 1960s Ntongoli (Bowl Lyre) from St. Cecilia's Hall, Edinburgh ==See also==