History of lute-family instruments

Ancient Egyptian tomb painting depicting players with long-necked, fretted lutes, 18th Dynasty (c. 1350 BC).

Hellenistic banquet scene from the 1st century AD, Hadda, Gandhara. Lute player with short-necked lute, far right.

Lutes are stringed musical instruments that include a body and "a neck which serves both as a handle and as a means of stretching the strings beyond the body".^[1]

The lute family includes not only short-necked plucked lutes such as the lute, oud, pipa, guitar, citole, gittern, mandore, rubab, and gambus and long-necked plucked lutes such as banjo, tanbura, bağlama, bouzouki, veena, theorbo, archlute, pandura, sitar, tanbur, setar, but also bowed instruments such as the yaylı tambur, rebab, erhu, and the entire family of viols and violins.^[1]

Lutes either rose in ancient Mesopotamia prior to 3100 BC or were brought to the area by ancient Semitic tribes. The lutes were pierced lutes; long-necked lutes with a neck made from a stick that went into a carved or turtle-shell bowl, the top covered with skin, and strings tied to the neck and instrument's bottom.

Curt Sachs, a musical historian, placed the earliest lutes at about 2000 BC in his 1941 book The History of Musical Instruments.^[2] This date was based on the archaeological evidence available to him at that time. The discovery of an apparent lute on an Akkadian seal, now in the British Museum, may have pushed the known existence of the plucked lute back to c. 3100 BC.^[3]

The lute's existence in art was more plain between 2330–2000 BC (the 2nd Uruk period), when the art had sufficient detail to show the instrument clearly. The instrument spread among the Hittites, Elamites, Assyrians, Mari, Babylonians and Hurrians. By c. 1500 BC the lute had reached Egypt, through conquest, and it had reached Greece by 320 BC both through Egypt and eastern neighbors. The lute spread eastward as well; long lutes today are found everywhere from Europe to Japan and south to India.

The short lute developed in Central Asia or Northern India in areas that had connection to Greece, China, India and the Middle East through trade and conquest. The short wood-topped lute moved east to China (as the pipa), south to India (as the vina), and west to the Middle East, Africa and Europe as the barbat and oud. From these two, and from skin topped lutes known today as rubabs and plucked fiddles, instruments developed in Europe.

Europeans had access to lutes in several ways. Foreign sources came in through Byzantium, Sicily and Andalusia. In the non-literate period, they apparently experimented with locally made instruments which were referenced in documents from the Carolingian Renaissance. This was overwhelmed by incoming instruments and Europeans developed whole families of lutes, both plucked and bowed.^{[citation needed]}

Lute-family instruments penetrated from East and Southeast Asia through Central Asia and the Middle East, through North Africa, Europe and Scandinavia.^{[citation needed]} These days, lute-family instruments are used worldwide.