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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. Precursors to lutes: A theory 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". 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 ne.... Discover the Susan Lute popular books. Find the top 100 most popular Susan Lute books.