A Missing Link: From Ki-thara to Gui-tar

The word guitar ultimately is derived from the word kithara, which was the standard formal harp played in ancient Greece and Rome. Although these names are similar, the instruments are quite different. The guitar has a neck - just one - while to kithara has two arms that extend up to support a bar onto which the strings are attached.

The image above shows an instrument which has both a neck and arms. This picture comes from the Bible of Charles the Bald completed in 846 CE. Charles the Bald (823-877 CE) ruled the short lived kingdom of West Francia which consisted of western France minus Brittany. This part of France was next to Spain, and included the Mediterranean Coast west of Italy. Thus, this picture would have been drawn when the Spanish territory directly south of West Francia was ruled by the Umayyad Emirs of Cordoba (756-929 CE). More images of instruments from this era can be found here.

The pair of blog entries below document that flat backed lutes were present in North Africa from the Ancient Egypt through the 6^th Century CE, before the Moorish conquest of Spain. The toga clad musician shown above appears to be strumming a variation of the small bodied African instrument which has a greatly increased, and presumably more resonating, body. Such a large body is a common design feature of the Roman kithara. Thus this instrument can be seen as a hybrid mixing the Moorish neck with a more resounding Greco-Roman body.

It is quite reasonable to assume that the guitar represents a fusion of two instruments from different cultures forced to live side by side. After all, African slaves in North America invented an instrument in which a guitar neck was stuck onto the body of a African skin lute. They called it a banjar. We know it as the banjo.

The Ukulele of the Pharaohs

This line drawing is a sketch made by Dominique Vivant, Baron Denon (1747-1852), the French artist, archaeologist, and museum official who played an important role in the development of the Louvre Museum collection. While in Egypt with Napoleon, he etched this image (which is attributed to 1,700 to 1,200 BCE), and published it is his 1802 publication entitled Voyage dans la hautte et basse Egypte. You can read more about this instrument at guitarra.artelinkado.com, which is in Spanish.

This instrument sure looks like a small guitar to me, and I really dig the two holes. Just below in this blog you can see an instrument much like it for Libya in the 6th Century CE. The significant of this Egyptian drawing is that it shows that flat backed lutes (what we would now call guitars) were in played North Africa from Pharaohnic times up through the Roman and Byzantine Era.

One can only assume that such a small instrument could have been transported to ports throughout the Mediterranean by sailors, much like small sized Portuguese cavaquenho, which gave rise to the Ukulele of Hawaii, the cavacao of Brazil, and the cuatro of Venezuela. It is entirely possible that this North African flat back lute could have made its way to the Phoenician trading colony of Malaka, founded in 1000 BCE on the southern coast of Spain. This city, now known as Malaga, is also widely accepted as the birthplace of the modern Spanish guitar.

6th Century Libyan Mosaic: Guitar Neck Origin?

This mosaic came from the floor of a Byzantine Christian Church dateing to the 6th Century CE. It was discovered in Qasr el Lebia, a rural community 50miles west of Cyrene in Libya, and is now displayed in the Qasr Libya Museum. The photo comes from the museum's web site.

The instrument in this mosaic is quite similar to one currently on display in the Metroplitan Museum of Art's Bryzantine Art Collection. The Met’s instrument had a smaller neck, more the size of a ukulele. It is four-stringed and came from Egypt in the 3rd - 4th Century CE.

The Met's web site states, that thier instument, "...is thought to have originated among the West Semites of Syria and was introduced to Egypt as a result of Hyksos influence.” The Hyksos were people from Asia Minor who migrated into Egypt, perhaps through invasion, and even ruled Egypt during the 15th and 16th Centuries, BCE, after which they were expelled by native Egyptian rulers. The Met’s site goes on to say of their little instrument, “Because of its waisted design and its place in music history, this member of the lute family may be considered a possible predecessor to the guitar, in particular the guitarra morisca.”

Clearly, the Qasr Libya mosaic appears to show instrument also has the hourglass shaped body of a guitar. It has four tuning keys, two on top and two below, much in the form of the modern guitar, and not in the form of the European lute or Arabic oud. Arab and native North African Berbers conquered much of Spain beginning in 718 CE, and were the dominant culture for the following 500 years. Based on this evidence, it seems plausible that the Qasr Libya instrument could have made its way to Spain.

Furthermore, there are many African lutes, from ancient Egypt on, which have a round neck, as if a broom handle was stuck through a hand drum. Such a neck can be used to support one or two strings. But the Qasr Libya musician appears to be playing with all four fingers, which would imply that the neck is flat, just like the instrument at the Met.

To me, the Qasr Libya instrument looks like a likely candidate for the origin of the guitar’s neck and tuning peg arrangement, and an influence on the guitars hourglass body shape. If one were to stick this neck on the body of a Roman kithara harp, you could end up with something that looked like a guitar.