Music: Ancient Egyptian Lute

New Kingdom (1380 BC)

(left) Bronze; Height 10.2 cm; New Kingdom razor handle with a Nubian lutenist.

Object is from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Carnarvon Collection, gift of Edward S. Harkness, 1926. Photo from the book The Horizon: History of Africa, American Heritage Publishing Co, 1971, p. 93.

The shape-edged underside served as a razor blade. On top of the blade is the figure of a Nubian dressed in a patterned kilt in a dancing pose. He wears a rounded, valanced wig with an ostrich feather on top, a broad collar, and bands on his ankles, wrists, and upper arms. His upraised left hand holds a lute (plucked, stringed musical instrument), whose fingerboard ends in the form of a rearward-looking duck's head. The figure is worked on both sides, and creates an impression of weightlessness through the free modeling of the arms and legs.

Lute Origin:

The Egyptian lute predates the Greek lute and is basically the same except more slender. No examples of the lute in Greek art are found before the fourth century B.C.(1) [photo below]

"Mesopotamia is the source of the earliest evidence of lutes in the world: representations on two seals dating back to the Akkadian period (2350 to 2170 B.C.). The Akkadian period lutes may have originated with West Semitic nomads from Syria. Lutes appeared in Egypt for the first time at the end of the Middle Kingdom Hyksos dynasties (XV to XVII dynasty, 1730 to 1580 B.C.) or the beginning of the succeeding New Kingdom XVIII dynasty (1580 to 1320 B.C.). This first appearance of the lute in Egypt came approximately one thousand years after the first musical instruments — clap sticks, sistrums, flutes, double clarinets, and harps — were depicted in Old Kingdom Egypt. The eighteenth century B.C. Hyksos invaders, from the Near East, are generally believed to be responsible for the appearance of the lute in Egypt".(2)