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 6th 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.
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