What it is: A decorated wooden harp or ... the golden lyre, the bull-headed lyre and the silver lyre. At about 4,500 years old, these harps are the world's oldest stringed instruments ever discovered.

1925 The earliest evidence of the harp is found in Ancient Egypt around 2500 BC. Back then, the instrument was shaped like a bow and had very few strings. Without the column seen on modern harps, they ...

The crwth is a form of stringed lyre which uses a bow to play the strings. There is archaeological evidence to suggest that similar instruments were in use 5,000 years ago in ancient Mesopotamia ...