The Comparative History of African Lyras

Abstract

A historical overview of the types of lyre existing in Africa supports the hypothesis that lyres represent an imported musical instrument on the African continent. However, the actual diffusion of this intrument type, spread through the avenues of interethnic contacts, shows a remarkable variety both temporally and geographically. The earliest iconographic datum can be dated to the reign of Mentuhoteb II (2010-1960 B.C.) in the time of the Eleventh Dynasty of the Middle Kingdom period. The morphological features of the instrument type lead one to conclude that main agents for the spread of kithara-type lyres into ancient Egypt must have been Hittite or Syrian traders. Similar lyre types have survived within the liturgical traditions of Coptic Christians, yet it remains a question whether they have survived through the centuries as part of the Coptic heritage of ancient Egypt, or else ancient Israelite kithara types appeared in the Coptic Christian culture of Ethiopia as a result of cultural influences across the Red Sea that connected the southern part of the Arabian peninsula and Ethiopia in Antiquity. Later on, in the Ptolemaic period (305–30 B.C.), another lyre type – the ancient Greek khelys having a tortoise-shell body – also spread into North Africa first, and thence to the traditional societies of Sub-Saharan Africa, a diffusion facilitated by the southward migration of Nilotic-speaking partoral nomads. By no means does this imply, of course, that bowl lyres were exclusively used by the Nilotic ethnic groups; yet it remains true that no data attest the existence of this intrument type in the inner Congo basin and the southern parts of Sub-Saharan Africa, areas outside the main migratory routes of the Nilotes. Since the desertification of the Sahara had already begun around 2500 B.C., ecological changes must have profoundly affected population movements, resulting in the southward migration of the livestockherding groups speaking Nilo-Saharan languages. This southward migration, however, was a slow and gradual, centuries-long process punctuated by many stops en route, given that the instrument type we are concerned with only appeared in Central and Eastern Africa in the 16th to late 19th centuries.