Arched harp
Arched harps is a category in the Hornbostel-Sachs classification system for musical instruments, a type of harp. The instrument may also be called bow harp. With arched harps, the neck forms a continuous arc with the body and has an open gap between the two ends of the arc.
Arched harps are probably the most ancient form of the harp, evolving from the musical bow. The first bowed harps appeared around 3000 B.C. in Iran and Mesopotamia and then in Egypt. India may have had the instrument as early as Mesopotamia.
The horizontal arched-bow from Sumeria spread west to ancient Greece, Rome and Minoan Crete and eastward to India. Like Egypt, however, India continued to develop the instrument on its own; undated artwork in caves shows a harp resembling a musical bow, with improvised resonators of different shapes and different numbers of added strings.
When the angular harp replaced the arched harp about 2000 B.C. in the Middle East and spread along the Silk Road, the arched harp was retained in India until after 800 A.D., and in Egypt until the Hellenistic Age. It can still be found today in Sub-Saharan Africa.
From India the arched harp was introduced into Malaysia, as well as Champa and Burma where it is still played under the name of saung, and in 7th-century A.D. Cambodia as the pin
Buddhists were involved with the spread of the arched harp in Asia. Artwork depicting the arched harp that survived in China, Malaysia, Indonesia, Burma, and Cambodia comes from Buddhist communities. The harp disappeared in India about the time when Hinduism displaced Buddhism. The Buddhists took the harp north from India along the silk road to China, where it was painted in the Mogao Caves and Yulin Grottos. Additionally, Buddhist Burma sent two types of harp to Chinese court to perform, including the phoenix-headed harp. The latter became known in China as the Phoenix-headed konghou.
Portable bowed harps may have made their way from Egypt up the Nile to East Africa and, branching off from this route, also to Central and West Africa.
Alternative, the arched harp may have entered Sub-Saharan Africa from Indonesia, during trade in the Middle Ages.
Description
Classification
The harp is a composite chordophone. It has string-carrying neck permanently attached to a resonator body that receives the vibrations of the strings and emits them as sound. Its strings are stretched between the neck and the body. What distinguishes it from lutes is that the plane of its strings is not parallel to the sound-emitting surface of the instrument's body, but perpendicular to it. The body and neck form an arch in arched harps, or two sides of a triangle in angular harps. If the triangle is completed, with a third side joining the body and neck, it is a frame harp. Harps without the third side are open harps.Structure
The body of the bowed harp is resonator. Its shape is varied, and it can have the shape of a spade, spoon or ladle, boat or box, among others. A leather soundboard is stretched on its open surface facing the direction of the strings, and a string-holding rod usually runs along its center line, to which the strings are tied. Their other end is connected to the neck via a tuning device - which can be a special loop, rotating leather ring or tuning peg. The defining characteristic of the bowed harp is that its neck starts more or less in the direction of the longitudinal axis of the body, and then curves.Bow harps have relatively few strings, usually fewer than 10, compared to angular harps, which usually have 15 to 25 strings. Historically, strings were made of sinew. Other materials have included gut, plant fiber, braided hemp, cotton cord, silk, nylon, and wire.
Variations
Bowed harps are diverse in both size and shape, from instruments small enough for a child to hold in their arms to harps made from logs, left lying flat on the ground.Similar to the angular harps, a vertical and horizontal variant can be distinguished here. The strings of the vertical bowed harp are more or less vertical, and most of the time the resonating body of the instrument is below the neck. The high notes are closer to the musician, the low notes are further away, just like in the case of today's Western harp. The body of the horizontal bowed harp is in a horizontal position, and the neck typically grows out of the end of the instrument body farthest from the musician.
History
The musical bow has been identified by some researchers as "the earliest chordophone". The earliest image of a musical bow from circa 15,000 B.C. was found in the Cave of the Trois-Frères. Musical bows need resonators, and a calabash gourd is used for that purpose. The musical bow "probably" became the bow harp when its disconnected resonator and the bow were integrated, the bow becoming the instrument's neck, and more strings were added.A very early depiction of a bow-shaped harp with three strings survives on a clay tablet from the Uruk period at the end of the 4th millennium. The image is a pictograph, an early form of writing, showing a three-stringed bow harp. The earliest harps appeared in Mesopotamia and Iran, circa 3300–3000, and researchers haven't determined if one is earlier than the other.
By 3000 B.C., bow harps were common in the Middle East. They were commonly depicted in Egypt by 2500 B.C. Harps depicted were always arched until about 2000 B.C. After that, harps were increasingly angular, until the arched harp disappeared from Mesopotamia and Iran. Frame harps used in Europe were invented about 1000 C.E. Separately, the Greeks had a frame harp, called spindle harp, shown well developed about 430 B.C. India also had early bow harps, similar to musical bows, visible in cave art which has not been precisely dated.
Earliest harp image
In excavations of Megiddo in the former land of Canaan, a harp image was found engraved on a paving stone dating from between 3300 and 3100 B.C. The image shows an apparent framed harp, probably in the hands of a woman, which was found in a group of 20 carvings on floor stones.According to Joachim Braun, this image of a stringed instrument predates the previously known images of Cycladic frame harps by 1000 years and is said to represent the oldest known forerunner of the Chang and angular harp in the Caucasus. Braun draws a typological connection to the tor-sapl-yukh angular harp played by the West Siberian Khanty and Mansi people up to the beginning of the 20th century, the free ends of which are connected by a strut. However, such an interpretation is not universally accepted; other authors want to be cautious in recognizing a harp or a lyre.
Another early image
An early image of a bow harp can be seen on a cylinder seal from Iran that dates from 3300 to 3100 B.C., found in Chogha Mish.It was found during excavations from 1961 to 1978 by the Oriental Institute, University of Chicago. Though broken, small fragments were put together to form an orchestra image which includes the harp. It is, perhaps, the oldest known image of an orchestra or ensemble.
In the image, a presumably female protagonist sits on the right-hand side. Facing her is a servant holding a milk jug for her, while opposite four musicians are also seated. A musician is playing a four-string bowed harp, and the figure below is beating a drum standing on the floor in front of it. Further to the left a musician is blowing a horn, and behind him the singer is holding a hand behind his cheek, as oriental singers still do today, such a Kurdish Dengbêjdo. The large jug with a handle in the middle and the scene on the right make it clear that the band is performing at a religious festival. Other illustrations of horizontal bowed harps come from Shar-i Sokhta in eastern and southeastern Iran.
Distribution
Mesopotamia
The harp was zà-mí in the Sumerian language. The Akkadian word for harp was sammû, possibly a loanword from Sumerian.Among the Sumerian pictographs from around 3000 B.C. is one in Uruk that resembles a vertical bowed harp. In this period similar representations also occur on stone tablets and seal impressions. A horizontal bowed harp can also be recognized on a Bismaya steatite vase fragment from the second half of the 3rd millennium B.C.
The remains of two 13-stringed harps were found in the royal cemetery of the city of Ur from around 2500 B.C. One harp was reconstructed and is now in the British Museum. All the wooden parts of the instruments were destroyed, but they could be easily reconstructed based on sketches from excavation, the gold and silver decoration embedded in bitumen that partially covered them, and images on seals.
In Mesopotamia, the bowed harp was used until around 1900 B.C., when it was replaced by the angular harp.
India, Indochina
In India today, the term veena includes a large variety of stringed instruments. In ancient Indian times, vina was used to name bowed harps and lutes and later to stick zithers. Names of arched harps included the fingerplucked chitra vīṇā with seven strings, the vipanchi vīṇā with nine strings and the mattakokila vīṇā with 21 strings. Today, the mainstream instruments using the name veena include the Rudra veena stick zither and Saraswati veena lute.In India, the vina harp had a history from circa 175 B.C. in the sculpture of Bharhut to artwork in circa 800 A.D. In looking for origins, ethnomusicologist Curt Sachs noted that the instrument in artwork in Mesopotamia and India was very close. He wrote that the horizontal harp seen in the Mesopotamian Bismaya art has the same "shape, position and manner of playing" as the Bharhut harp. Sachs felt that the link to the Bismaya harp was direct, that it could not be related to the Egyptian harp. His reasons included that both the Indian and Iraq harps were played horizontally with plectrums, and Egyptian were not. In spite of this, Sachs also wrote that the Egyptian bīnꞏt and Indian bīn were the same word.
When Mesopotamia and Iran abandoned the use of the arched harp for the angular harp towards about 1900 B.C., Egypt and India continued to use the instrument. The development of the angular harp did not occur in India, nor did the chang angular harp type, widespread in the Middle Ages in the Orient, have an Indian counterpart at any time. The arched harp lasted in art in India until circa 800 A.D., and later in connected communities in Southeast Asia.
Among the writings of the Indus Valley Civilization there were pictograms resembling a harp, but after the Indus script stopped being used, there wasn't a depiction of a harp up to the 2nd century B.C. Upon the re-appearance of Indian pictorial art, bowed harps were immediately visible, so it is possible that the type of instrument was in continuous use until then. The instruments mentioned as vina or vipanci in the Natya Shastra, the oldest Indian collection of texts on music written in Sanskrit circa 200 B.C.E. — 200 C.E., were probably multi-stringed bowed harps. In Old Tamil literature, the term yazh is used for "harp". The Indian bow harp is most often used in a religious context related to Buddhism.
Paintings in caves have revealed growth in human culture, as the focus of paintings moved from animals and hunting scenes to images of "ritual participants." In India in the rock caves of Bhimbetka have preserved paintings dating from the Mesolithic to historical times. In addition to numerous depictions of animals, there are scenes from the "late Bronze Age and Iron Age" of ritual dances and musicians.
Over time, the subject matter of paintings began to change, and "painters shifted from imaginary images to ritual participants." These ritual would come to include music, dancers and musicians. The timeline hasn't been settled.
An early version of the bow harp has been found in 5 cave paintings in the Pachmarhi hills. The harps are bows with 1-5 strings and one end attached to a resonator. The cave names are Batki Bundal, Nimbu Bhoj, Rajat Prapat, Kanji Ghat, and Langi Nadi.
According to the descriptions in the Vedas, the same instrumentation as in Choga Mish—bowed harp, flute, drum and song—was used in the 1st millennium B.C.in ancient India to accompany dancers. Similarly in the shelters in the Pachmarhi hills, all four classes of musical instruments can be found in paintings, idiophones, membranophones, chordophones and aerophones.
The modern term vina was originally applied to arched harps, the ancient veena. Literary evidence is found in Brahmana texts, according to which the harp was said to have had "a hundred strings".