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".
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.
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. 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.
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.
Lute-family instruments penetrated from East and Southeast Asia through Central Asia and the Middle East, through North Africa, Europe and Scandinavia. These days, lute-family instruments are used worldwide.
Potential precursors to lutes
Theory In theory, families of musical instruments descend from the musical bow.
Henri Breuil surveyed the Trois Frères caves in France and made an engraving that attempted to reproduce a c. 13,000 BC cave painting into a black-and-white lithograph engraving. His engraving showed a mysterious figure, a "man camouflaged to resemble a bison", in the midst of a mass of herd-animals, "herding the beasts and playing the musical bow". The artwork is confused, and those who are trying to reproduce the art in color have had to work to bring out legible images. One interpretation of the "magician-hunter" image considers his hunting-bow to be a musical bow, used as a single-stringed musical instrument.
Whether the bow in the cave illustration is a musical instrument or the hunting tool in a Paleolithic hunt, musicologists have considered the idea that the bow could be a possible relative or ancestor to chordophones, the lutes lyres, harps and zither families. Curt Sachs said that there was good reason not to consider hunters' bows as likely musical bows. One reason was that the oldest known musical bows were 10 feet long, useless for hunting, and that "musical bows were not associated with hunters' beliefs and ceremonies".
Sachs considered the musical bows important, however. He pointed out that the name for the Greek lute, pandûra was likely derived from pan-tur, a Sumerian word meaning "small bow". He considered this evidence in support of the theory that the musical bow was ancestral to the pierced lute.
The bows used for music required a resonator, a hollowed object like a bowl, a gourd or a musician's mouth, in order to produce audible sound. Although the musical bow could be manipulated to produce more than one tone instruments were developed from it that used one note per string. Since each string played a single note, adding strings added new notes for instrument families such as bow harps, harps and lyres. In turn, this led to being able to play dyads and chords. Another innovation occurred when the bow harp was straightened out and a bridge used to lift the strings off the stick-neck, creating the lute.
Theory disputed This picture of musical bow to harp bow is theory and has been contested. In 1965 Franz Jahnel wrote his criticism stating that the early ancestors of plucked instruments are not currently known. He felt that the harp bow was a long cry from the sophistication of the 4th-millennium BC civilization that took the primitive technology and created "technically and artistically well-made harps, lyres, citharas and lutes".
Long-necked lutes
The most ancient lutes had long necks. These survived into the modern era as the tanbur, which Sachs said "faithfully preserved the outer appearance of the ancient lutes of Babylonia and Egypt". Sachs, one of those who created the widespread system of musical instrument classification idea today, categorized long lutes with a "pierced lute" and "long neck lute". The pierced lute had a neck made from a stick that pierced the body (as in the ancient Egyptian long-neck lutes, and the modern African gunbrī). The long lute had an attached neck, and included the sitar, tanbur and tar (dutār 2 strings, setār 3 strings, čatār 4 strings, pančtār 5 strings).
Musicologist Richard Dumbrill today uses the word lute more categorically to discuss instruments that existed millennia before the term "lute" was coined. Dumbrill documented more than 3000 years of iconographic evidence for the lutes in Mesopotamia, in his book The Archaeomusicology of the Ancient Near East. According to Dumbrill, the lute family included instruments in Mesopotamia prior to 3000 BC. He points to a cylinder seal as evidence; dating from c. 3100 BC or earlier (now in the possession of the British Museum) the -seal depicts on one side what is thought to be a woman playing a stick "lute". Culture period: Late Uruk, Date: c. 3100 BC, Museum number: 41632. Like Sachs, Dumbrill saw length as distinguishing lutes, dividing the Mesopotamian lutes into a long variety and a short. His book does not cover the shorter instruments that became the European lute, beyond showing examples of shorter lutes in the ancient world. He focuses on the longer lutes of Mesopotamia, various types of necked chordophones that developed throughout ancient world: Greek, Egyptian (in the Middle Kingdom), Iranian (Elamite and others), Hittite, Roman, Bulgar, Turkic, Indian, Chinese, Armenian/Cilician cultures. He names among the long lutes, the pandura and the tanbur
Experts who study the people from ancient civilizations in Mesopotamia region argue as to which people the long-necked people originated. Candidates include "East Semites" of Akkad, peoples in Elam and "West Semites". The instrument was probably distributed by the Hittites, Hurrians and Kassites, rather than invented by them.
Examples from 2334 to 2000 BC (Uruk period 3) exist from Ischali, Eshnunna (Tell Asmar), Kish, Mesopotamia, Iran, Iraq, Tello, Susa. Later examples exist from 2000 to 1500 BC (Uruk period 4). Examples were found in Khafajah, Mari, Isin or Larsa, Iran, Babylon, Tell Mamabaqat Syria, Susa, and Alaca Huyuk. In period 5 from 1500 to 1000 BC, the Egyptians acquired the lute and their art also contributed to our knowledge, as well as actual lutes found in graves.
Prehistoric roots in Sumer, westward to Egypt
Sumerians, Babylonians, Kassites, Assyrians, Persians, Greeks all ruled the Mesopotamian area between Tigris and Euphrates rivers where the earliest examples of lutes have survived in clay and stone artwork. Sachs described the Mesopotamian lutes as having "very small bodies, long necks with many frets, two strings attached without pegs and were played with a plectron". The long lute entered Egypt after its conquest of Southwest Asia, when it began receiving tribute in the form of "singing and dancing-girls with their instruments", illustrated in paintings at Tell El-Amarna.
The paintings of the Egyptian lutes are detailed enough to provide a better understanding of ancient long lutes. Furthermore, original lutes survived in tombs, some still with strings attached. The Egyptian pierced-lutes had a carved wooden bowl for the instrument's body, "usually oval", covered with rawhide. A stick which acted as the instrument's neck pierced the instrument's body. The stick was threaded through cuts in the top of the rawhide to the end of the bowl. It was attached to the strings through a "triangular opening cut in the skin" at the bottom of the bowl. Besides being woven through the skin-soundboard, the stick was supported underneath by "wooden crosspieces" that ran crosswise underneath the stick, to the edges of the bowl on either side. The strings were "wound around the top of the handle" and tied with thongs, the tassels visible in some surviving artwork.
Nora E. Scott gave more details about the Egyptian lute's construction, saying that the lute that belonged to Har-Mose, 1500 BC, had two bridges, the triangular bridge at the bottom, attached to the stick and protruding through the skin, and another on the neck.|quote=The Lute of the Singer Har-Mose The string passed over the second bridge and was tied down to the neck with linen cord to keep its tension. The player tuned the lute by pulling the string tight over the second bridge and tightening the linen cord to hold. The second bridge corresponds in function to the nut on a guitar or mandolin. The soundboard skin could have as many as six soundholes.
Sachs points out one significant difference between the Egyptian lutes and other pierced lutes of the ancient world. The non-Egyptian lutes had a stick handle piercing the bowl on both ends (spike lutes), rather than having one end resting inside the bowl (tang lutes). He also gave consideration to African skin-topped instruments that survived into the 20th century, noting that those in Morocco and Senegambia, such as the gunbri, might be descendants. He said the instruments "degenerated" from the Egyptian instruments, but then were developed after the Arab conquest of North Africa. Other differences he noted include different body shapes, attaching strings to "lateral pegs" (rather than tying strings directly to the neck) and reducing the instrument's size.
Gallery: ancient long-necked lutes
Greece and Rome, pandura
The long-necked lute made the journey to Greece as well; in the 5th century BC the Egyptian lute made it into Greek sculpture, recognizable as a pierced lute, stick running into an oval body, with triangular bridge at base of instrument and two lines of soundholes parallel to the stick, on either side of it. A century later at Mantineia, the pierced lute would be changed, with a broader neck, somewhat shorter than the earlier Egyptian style lute, but still a long-necked instrument, with the neck longer than the soundbox. A second version at Tanagra in 200 BC was carved from a single piece of wood, neck and soundbox, pear-shaped much as the short-lutes that later arrived from Central Asia. Still another form of the pandura would have a one-piece carved triangular body with skin stretched across it.