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The discovery of a bone wind instrument dating to the 5th millennium BCE provides the earliest evidence of music culture in Mesopotamia; depictions of music and musicians appear in the 4th millennium BCE; and later, in the city of Uruk, the pictograms for ‘harp’ and ‘musician’ are present among the earliest known examples of writing.
In Mesopotamia, a balag (or balaĝ) refers both to a Sumerian religious literary genre and also to a closely associated musical instrument.In Mesopotamian religion, Balag prayers were sung by a Gala priest as ritual acts were performed around the instrument.
The Lyres of Ur or Harps of Ur is a group of four string instruments excavated in a fragmentary condition at the Royal Cemetery at Ur in modern Iraq from 1922 onwards. They date back to the Early Dynastic III Period of Mesopotamia, between about 2550 and 2450 BC, making them the world's oldest surviving stringed instruments. [1]
The Mesopotamian sun god Utu/Shamash was often taken to assume the form of a bull, particularly in his role at sunrise, and is the figure most frequently described in some cuneiform texts as having a lapis lazuli beard. [2] For these reasons, the Penn Museum has asserted that the bull head of the lyre is a representation of Utu/Shamash. [3]
The earliest reference to the word "lyre" is the Mycenaean Greek ru-ra-ta-e, meaning "lyrists" and written in the Linear B script. [5] 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. [6]
Similar instruments include the Tambura, Tamburica, and the Ukrainian bandura. The Greek tambouras is a long-neck fretted instrument of the lute family, similar to the Turkish saz and the Persian tanbur. Furthermore, the fretted Tanbur influenced the design of many instruments other than those above, notably:
Ugarit, where the Hurrian songs were found. The complete song is one of about 36 such hymns in cuneiform writing, found on fragments of clay tablets excavated in the 1950s from the Royal Palace at Ugarit (present-day Ras Shamra, Syria), [5] in a stratum dating from the fourteenth century BC, [6] but is the only one surviving in substantially complete form.
Arched harps is a category in the Hornbostel-Sachs classification system for musical instruments, a type of harp. [5] The instrument may also be called bow harp. [6] With arched harps, the neck forms a continuous arc with the body and has an open gap between the two ends of the arc (open harps).