Arched harp

Arched harp
Sculpture of woman playing a bow harp
Before becoming stick zithers Indian veenas were arched harps. Sculpture of a woman playing the veena 6th–7th century, India (Jammu and Kashmir, ancient kingdom of Kashmir)
String instrument
Other names
  • bow harp
  • India: chitra vīṇā,[1][2] vipanchi vīṇā,[1][2] mattakokila vīṇā,[1] bīn/vina[3][4]
  • Egypt: bīnꞏt, b.nt, bent, benet,[4] Coptic voina
Classification plucked string instrument
Hornbostel–Sachs classification322
  • 322.1 Open harps – The harp has no pillar.
    • 322.11 Arched harps.
      (Harps, the plane of the strings lies perpendicular to the resonator's surface)
DevelopedArose from the musical bow during the Bronze Age; earliest harps seen in artwork in Canaan (angular harp), Mesopotamia, Iran and India (all arched harps).
Related instruments

Arched harps is a category in the Hornbostel-Sachs classification system for musical instruments, a type of harp.[5] The instrument may also be called bow harp.[6] With arched harps, the neck forms a continuous arc with the body and has an open gap between the two ends of the arc (open harps).[6]

Arched harps are probably the most ancient form of the harp, evolving from the musical bow.[7] The first bowed harps appeared around 3000 B.C. in Iran and Mesopotamia and then in Egypt.[7] India may have had the instrument as early as Mesopotamia.[7]

The horizontal arched-bow from Sumeria spread west to ancient Greece, Rome and Minoan Crete and eastward to India.[8] 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.[9]

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. (a form of ancient vina), and in Egypt until the Hellenistic Age (after 500 B.C).[7] It can still be found today in Sub-Saharan Africa.

From India the arched harp was introduced into Malaysia, as well as Champa[10] and Burma (as early as 500 A.D.)[11] where it is still played under the name of saung,[12] and in 7th-century A.D. Cambodia as the pin[13]

Bhuddists were involved with the spread of the arched harp in Asia.[12] 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.[12] 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.[14]

Alternative, the arched harp may have entered Sub-Saharan Africa from Indonesia, during trade in the Middle Ages.[8]

  1. ^ a b c Piyal Bhattacharya; Shreetama Chowdhury (January–March 2021). "How the Ancient Indian Vīṇā Travelled to Other Asian Countries: A Reconstruction though Scriptures, Sculptures, Paintings and Living Traditions" (PDF). National Security. 4 (1). Vivekananda International Foundation: 47.
  2. ^ a b Stephens, John. "The Microtones of Bharata's Natyashastra" (PDF). Analytical Approaches to World Music Journal: 2. Bharata described two types of vina-s: the seven-stringed citra to be played with the fingers, and the nine-stringed vipanci to be played with an ivory pick called the kona (Rangacharya 2010, 240).
  3. ^ Sachs, Curt (1940). The History of Musical Instruments. New York: W. W. Norton and Company. pp. 94, 156. The Egyptian name of the harp was bīnꞏt, the letter t being the feminine ending...Probably identical with the well-known name bīn in Hindustani and vīna in Sanscrit...
  4. ^ a b Marcuse, Sibyl (1964). "Bīnt". Musical Instruments, A Comprehensive Dictionary. Garden City, New York: Doubleday. p. 54. ...harps in Ancient Egypt...[the word is] possibly related to the bīn of N. India
  5. ^ von Hornbostel, Erich M.; Sachs, Curt (March 1961). "Classification of Musical Instruments: Translated from the Original German by Anthony Baines and Klaus P. Wachsmann". The Galpin Society Journal. 14. Galpin Society: 3–29. doi:10.2307/842168. JSTOR 842168.
  6. ^ a b DeVale, Sue Carole (20 January 2001). "Harp, I. Introduction". Grove Music Online (8th ed.). Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-1-56159-263-0.
  7. ^ a b c d Lawergren, Bo. "Angular Harps Through the Ages – A Causal History" (PDF). pp. 262, 272. Retrieved 12 August 2011.
  8. ^ a b Duchesne-Guillemin, Marcelle (February 1981). "Music in ancient Mesopotamia and Egypt". World Archaeology. 12 (3): 293. doi:10.1080/00438243.1981.9979803. JSTOR 124240.
  9. ^ Dubey-Pathak, Meenakshi (2000). "Musical Depictions in the Rock-Paintings of the Pachmarhi Hills in Central India". In Ellen Hickmann; Ricardo Eichmann (eds.). Studien zur Musikarchäologie I. Saiteninstrumente im archäologischen Kontext. Orient-Archäologie, Band 6 (Orient Department of the German Archaeological Institute, Berlin). Rahden/Westphalia: Verlag Marie Leidorf. pp. 22–23, 29. ISBN 9783896466365. A painting in the Nimbu Bhoj shelter shows...the male figure is playing a string harp...Fig. 2 Harper and family...
  10. ^ Patrick Kersale. "The arched harp in Champa". Sounds of Angkor.
  11. ^ Becker, Judith (1967). "The Migration of the Arched Harp from India to Burma". The Galpin Society Journal. 20: 17–23. doi:10.2307/841500. JSTOR 841500.
  12. ^ a b c Śrīrāma Goyala (1 August 1992). Reappraising Gupta History: For S.R. Goyal. Aditya Prakashan. p. 237. ISBN 978-81-85179-78-0. - ...yazh resembles this old vina... however it is the Burmese harp which seems to have been handed down in almost unchanged form since ancient times
  13. ^ "Cambodian folk Music". Women's Media Center of Cambodia. Retrieved 27 October 2018. According to experts, the "harp" is a kind of traditional Khmer instrument from native to India. " Harp "has existed in Cambodia since the 7th century and disappeared in the late 12th century or early in the 13th century, according to Keo Sorunwy, professor of the Faculty of Education, Trei Royal University of Fine Arts.
  14. ^ Wachsmann, Klaus (1964). "Human Migration and African Harps". Journal of the International Folk Music Council. 16: 84–88. doi:10.2307/835087. JSTOR 835087.