LYRE

The lyre is a string instrument known for its use in Greek classical antiquity and later. A classical lyre has a hollow body or sound-chest (also known as soundbox or resonator), was made out of turtle shell. The lyre is related to the pan-Mediterranean lyre known in antiquity and probably originating in Sumeria or that region. It was carried down the Nile in two forms, as the small, tortoise-shell resonated lyre and the larger, ground-standing instrument, today surviving as the beqena in Ethiopia, but clearly related to the Greek kithara. The lyres of modern East Africa probably reflect ancient diffusion of the instrument via Egypt. Box lyres survive only in Ethiopia and among the Sebei, a Nilo-Hamitic people of Uganda.