Ancient Greek harps

The psalterion (Greek ψαλτήριον) is a stringed, plucked instrument, an ancient Greek harp. Psalterion was a general word for harps in the latter part of the 4th century B.C. It meant "plucking instrument".

In addition to their most important stringed instrument, the seven-stringed lyre, the Greeks also used multi-stringed, finger-plucked instruments: harps. The general name for these was the psalterion. Ancient vase paintings often depict – almost always in the hands of women – various types of harps. Names found in written sources include pektis, trigonos, magadis, sambuca, epigonion. These names could denote instruments of this type.

Unlike the lyres, the harp was rarely used in Greece. It was seen as an "outside instrument" from the Orient. It also touched on Greek social mores, being used mainly by women, both upper-class women as well as hetaerae entertainers. There was a group of women known as psaltriai, female pluckers of the instrument who could be hired for parties. Anacreon, poet of drinking and love (and infatuation, disappointment, revelry, parties, festivals, and observations of everyday people), sang of playing the Lydian harp and pektis in his works.

The "most important" harps were the psaltêrion, the mágadis and the pēktis. The Latin equivalent of the word, psalterium, has been the name of many-stringed box zithers or board zithers since the Middle Ages.

Harps probably evolved from the most ancient type of stringed instrument, the musical bow. In its simplest version, the sound body of the bowed harp and its neck, which grows out as an extension, form a continuous bow similar to an up-bowed bow, with the strings connecting the ends of the bow. Such an instrument was already used by the Sumerians around 3400 BCE and the Egyptians in 2500 BCE.

In Mesopotamia around 2000 BCE, a new type of harp, the angular harp, took its place; it appeared in Egypt after a few centuries later. In the angular harp, the neck of the instrument is connected to the body at a right angle, and in later periods at an acute angle. This type is from the 2nd millennium BCE, and it also appears in Cypriot depictions.

In the Aegean Sea area, in the 3rd millennium BCE, the Cycladic culture left behind marble figurines depicting men with harps. These are the oldest representations known in the history of musical instruments in which a frame harp can be recognized. They show a harp whose body and neck are connected by a third element, a column, thereby completing the complete triangular shape of the instrument. Researchers believe that they discovered a similar instrument on some of the seal presses of the Minoan civilization from the period between 1900 and 1700 BCE.

In the following thousand years, in the Greek Bronze Age and then in the early Iron Age, there are hardly any traces of the harp in the Aegean region. The first data appears around 600 BCE, and in the Greek visual arts the harp appears from the middle of the 5th century BCE. Written sources link the harp to Asia Minor, in Lydia.