The guitar is an ancient and noble instrument, whose history can be traced back over 4000 years. Many theories have been advanced about the instrument's ancestry. It has often been claimed that the guitar is a development of the lute, or even of the ancient Greek kithara. Research done by Dr. Michael Kasha in the 1960's showed these claims to be without merit. He showed that the lute is a result of a separate line of development, sharing common ancestors with the guitar, but having had no influence on its evolution. The influence in the opposite direction is undeniable, however - the guitar's immediate forefathers were a major influence on the development of the fretted lute from the fretless oud which the Moors brought with them to to Spain.
The sole "evidence" for the kithara theory is the similarity between the greek word "kithara" and the Spanish word "quitarra". It is hard to imagine how the guitar could have evolved from the kithara, which was a completely different type of instrument - namely a square-framed lap harp, or "lyre". (Image Below)
The earliest stringed instruments known to archaeologists are bowl harps and tanburs. Since prehistory people have made bowl harps using tortoise shells and calabashes as resonators, with a bent stick for a neck and one or more gut or silk strings. The world's museums contain many such "harps" from the ancient Sumerian, Babylonian, and Egyptian civilisations. Around 2500 - 2000 CE more advanced harps, such as the opulently carved 11-stringed instrument with gold decoration found in Queen Shub-Ad's tomb, started to appear.
At 3500 years old, this is the ultimate vintage guitar! It belonged to the Egyptian singer Har-Mose. He was buried with his tanbur close to the tomb of his employer, Sen-Mut, architect to Queen Hatshepsut, who was crowned in 1503 BCE. Sen-Mut (who, it is suspected, was far more than just chief minister and architect to the queen) built Hatshepsuts beautiful mortuary temple, which stands on the banks of the Nile to this day.(On The Right)
The name "guitar" comes from the ancient Sanskrit word for "string" - "tar". (This is the language from
which the languages of central Asia and northern India developed.) Many stringed folk instruments exist in Central Asia
to this day which have been used in almost unchanged form for several thousand years, as shown by archeological finds in
the area. Many have names that end in "tar", with a prefix indicating the number of strings:
Dotar
two = Sanskrit "dvi" - modern Persian "do" -
dotar, two-string instrument found in Turkestan
three = Sanskrit "tri" - modern Persian "se" -
setar, 3-string instrument, found in Persia (Iran),
(cf. sitar, India, elaborately developed, many-stringed)
four = Sanskrit "chatur" - modern Persian "char" -
chartar, 4-string instrument, Persia (most commonly known as "tar" in modern usage)
(cf. quitarra, early Spanish 4-string guitar,
modern Arabic qithara, Italian chitarra, etc)
five = Sanskrit "pancha" - modern Persian "panj" -
panchtar, 5 strings, Afghanistan
At around the same time that Torres started making his breakthrough fan-braced guitars in Spain, German
immigrants to the USA - among them Christian Fredrich Martin - had begun making guitars with X-braced tops. Steel strings
first became widely available in around 1900. Steel strings offered the promise of much louder guitars, but the increased
tension was too much for the Torres-style fan-braced top. A beefed-up X-brace proved equal to the job, and quickly became
the industry standard for the flat-top steel string guitar.
At the end of the 19th century Orville Gibson was building archtop guitars with oval sound holes. He married the steel-string
guitar with a body constructed more like a cello, where the bridge exerts no torque on the top, only pressure straight down.
This allows the top to vibrate more freely, and thus produce more volume. In the early 1920's designer Lloyd Loar joined
Gibson, and refined the archtop "jazz" guitar into its now familiar form with f-holes, floating bridge and cello-type
tailpiece.
The electric guitar was born when pickups were added to Hawaiian and "jazz" guitars in the late 1920's, but met with little
success before 1936, when Gibson introduced the ES150 model, which Charlie Christian made famous.
With the advent of amplification it became possible to do away with the soundbox altogether. In the late 1930's and early
1940's several actors were experimenting along these lines, and controversy still exists as to whether Les Paul, Leo Fender,
Paul Bigsby or O.W. Appleton constructed the very first solid-body guitar. Be that as it may, the solid-body electric guitar
was here to stay.