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.