Building a Lyre of Ur — The Sumerian Bull Lyre

The lyres from the Royal Cemetery of Ur (about 2500 BC) are the oldest stringed instruments ever found — deep soundboxes crowned with a golden bull's head, their strings plucked one note at a time.

Build a hollow wooden soundbox, broad and deep — the Ur lyre was large and full-voiced, much bigger than a Greek lyre.

Glue a thin soundboard over the top to seal the chamber, and cut a soundhole so the built-up sound can escape.

Fix two stout wooden arms rising up from the soundbox, leaning slightly outward like the horns of a bull.

Lay a crossbar — the yoke — between the tops of the two arms. The strings will hang from this bar down to the soundbox.

Carve or model a bull's head for the front of the soundbox — the emblem of the Ur lyres, whose deep tone echoed the bull's bellow.

Anchor eight to eleven strings at the soundbox, run each up to the yoke, and wrap it around the bar with a leather strip so it can be tuned by twisting.

Twist each string's wrap around the yoke to tune it — tighter for a higher note — setting the strings to the notes of a scale, lowest to highest.

Pluck the open strings with your fingers or a plectrum. Because each string is a fixed note, you play a lyre by choosing which strings to sound.

A lyre is a yoke instrument: its strings run from the soundbox up to a crossbar (the yoke) held between two arms, and each string is tuned to its own note and plucked open. Unlike the fretted langspil or a guitar, a lyre has no way to shorten a string as you play, so it needs one string per note — which is why lyres have many strings. The soundbox amplifies them exactly as in every stringed instrument: the thin strings shake the light soundboard, which drives the air in the box out through the soundhole. The lyres of Ur, from about 2500 BC, are the oldest stringed instruments ever found — buried in the Royal Cemetery with gold, lapis lazuli and a bull's head whose deep voice the instrument's tone was meant to echo. They were tuned by wrapping each string around the yoke with a strip of leather or a tuning rod and twisting it. The Greek lyre and kithara are direct descendants of this Near-Eastern design, and the same string-and-soundbox idea, given a fretted neck, grows into the lute and the guitar. String pitch obeys the same three rules as the musical bow: tension, length and mass.