The History of the Guitar (Part 1A): In the Beginning
Tracing back the history of the guitar is one of the hardest things you would attempt to do. This is simply because there are no documents that are able to trace exactly when it came into being.
Another reason is that over time, there have been many instruments that use strings in different places and amongst different people and that has made it very easy to get confused with the whole thing.
As a result of this lack of any established sources that could rightly point this out with facts, it is very easy for different people to make different speculations based on convenience, argument, and situations.
There are some that have insisted that the history of the guitar cannot be anyway be drawn back farther than the 15th century. Still, there are many that have come up with evidences, which have been open to dispute to claim that the instrument is older than the said century.
Bowl Harpa and Tanburs
Based on the evidence from archaeology, while the story of the history of the guitar has many heads, the first stringed instruments were the bowl harps and tanburs.
The bowl harps first began with the use of tortoise shells and later the calabashes as resonators. Bent sticks were attached and stringed. These bowl harps were traced to the ancient civilizations of Samaria, Babylon, and Egypt and it was prior to the 2500 - 2000 CE which saw the development of more advanced harps.
The tanbur on the other hand was archeologically traced to Egypt, Persia and Mesopotamia. Also with the design of the Guitar, this comes with a long neck and an egg like body. The instrument also makes use of strings. This is supported by paintings on walls and stones that have been associated to those civilizations.
Some of these earliest forms of instruments were able to survive to modern times and not just in paintings and carvings.
The thing, however, is that there are still many classes of thoughts that don’t believe these instruments have anything to do with the modern guitar. This has been a source of great debate even among experts in both musical instruments and history.
Linguistic Argument on the History of The Guitar
Linguistically, origin of the guitar has been linked to the Bengali, Hindi, and Urdu languages of India and Persia. More so, it was said to have been drawn from the Sanskrit.
It rather makes some sense here, pointing out that the linguists have indicated that the word tar came from what was referred to as strings as such it was used to describe most of those instruments that made use of strings.
It was pointed out that a prefix was added to tar to indicate the number of strings used. For example, dvi, tri, chatur, and pancha, were Sanskrit words that represented two, three, four, and five. In the modern Persian, they were used as do, se, char, and panj.
In this line came the dotar, setar, andchartar which were used in Turkistan, Iran, and later Spain. There was also the Spanish quitarraand the Greek Kitharas.
This, nevertheless, doesn’t settle the argument that claims that the Kithara which had between seven to eleven strings gave birth to the four-course guitar much later. For many, why the Kithara is hard to accept as in the evolution of the guitar is because it doesn’t have a neck.
Now, there is yet another level to the argument and that is if it was indigenously invented in the European region or it came through the Arabs who had an instrument called theud which has been believed to later change into the lute. The second part of the argument is better accepted by many people.
Apart from the Arabs, the Romans were also said to have influenced the evolution of the instrument.
Steemians, I hope you were able to catch the first part of this series here: @playitforward/the-history-of-the-guitar-part-i-in-the-begin
