Pazyryk harp

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The Pasyryk harp is the archaeological find of a horizontal angle harp from the 4th century BC. BC on the highlands of Ulagan in the Altai , which lies in the southwest Siberian part of Russia . Sergei Ivanovich Rudenko discovered the wooden fragments of the corner harp in 1947 in a kurgan (burial mound) belonging to the Pasyryk culture . They are the oldest example of a harp in northern Asia. The restored musical instrument is in the Hermitage in Saint Petersburg.

Origin of the Asian angle harps

The earliest illustration of a musical instrument in Mesopotamia shows on a clay tablet from the Uruk period at the end of the 4th millennium BC. BC an arched harp with three strings. This simplest type of harp is a further development of the single-stringed musical bow . Wilhelm Stauder reproduced the corresponding ideogram with the Sumerian sound value BALAG, which in earlier times probably meant musical instruments in general. With the addition of giš, "wood", GIŠ.BALAG for a stringed instrument to distinguish it from BALAG or KUŠ.BALAG for an hourglass-shaped drum . The bow harp is used in the ancient Indian Vedas of the 1st millennium BC. Chr. Referred to as vina . Until the 12th century AD, it existed in South Asia alongside the stick zithers and is now practically only preserved in the form of the Burmese saung gauk .

Around 2000 BC An improved type of harp with a higher number of strings developed, known as angled harp, which only disappeared from its core area, the Iranian highlands , in the 17th century AD . The Sumerian symbol was ZAG-SAL. From the Assyrian word zak'k'al was on Arabic čangal , in Persian shortened to Cang ( chang ), which in today played Georgian angle harp CANGI ( tschangi is received).

The basic construction of the Winkelharp has remained unchanged throughout its existence until today. Two models can be distinguished according to the position of the resonance body and the playing style. Large vertical angle harps in Egypt or Mesopotamia, held in a vertical position with the sound box, had a large number of strings - up to 20 or more. The player plucked it with his fingers while tearing the horizontally carried smaller angular harp with a maximum of ten strings with an opening pick .

Pazyryk level

The Pasyryk culture, a period of the nomadic Scythian cattle breeders, is named after the place where it was found Pasyryk near Bashadar in a mountain valley of the Altai at 1650 meters. Here leaders and other distinguished members of the tribal society were buried in shaft graves. The ceiling of the tomb, formed from a beam construction, was covered with a four meter high stone mound. The graves belong to the Bronze Age and from the second half of the 1st millennium BC. The Iron Age . At the end of the 19th century, research into the Kurgane began in the Altai area. Kurgan II by Pasyryk is of particular importance for the history of music because, in addition to the harp, it included two small cattle horn drums. They represent the archetypal forms of single-skin cup drums in the region, including the wooden tombak in Iran and the clay zerbaghali in Afghanistan . The rich grave goods, which were obviously intended for survival in the afterlife, also included food, clothing, iron tools, weapons, wool carpets (of which the Pasyryk carpet was preserved), other utensils and co-buried horses .

The perishable materials and the buried corpses have been preserved because they were enclosed in blocks of ice. The water that entered the graves was frozen and was protected from thawing by the overlying rock layer even during the short and only moderately warm summers.

Design

During the restoration, the two parts of the harp that were found could be precisely joined together to form an 83 centimeter long tub-shaped body . The carefully smoothed wood made from one piece is eleven centimeters wide at both ends and tapers when viewed from above to a center that is clearly waisted at five centimeters. In the side view, the body shape is slightly curved, in the cross section there is a horseshoe shape. The walls were thinned to five to seven millimeters thick and stabilized with three cross bars between the edges like a canoe. These should equalize the tension of the membrane from an animal skin, which is pulled up at both ends. The red-colored pieces of skin were fastened with tiny wooden dowels just below the edge, the middle part was covered by a thin wooden board that was probably glued on. The broken wooden ceiling was four millimeters thick and had a sound hole in the middle, and three holes one centimeter in diameter were cut into each piece of skin.

On one side of the body, an elliptical rod with a maximum diameter of twelve millimeters was tied to the middle of the skin. It cannot be seen that this wooden stick ran under the ceiling, as with almost all harps. Eleven centimeters of the originally longer rod have been preserved. Its slight curvature is probably due to the pulling of the strings that were stretched between it and the string bearer, which was roughly perpendicular to the skin cover. The T-shaped string carrier, cut out of a branch at its connection to the trunk, stood with its broad foot in the longitudinal direction and was tied with a skin cord. The cord passed through a hole at the outer end of the string support, took up the tension of the strings and transferred it to a wooden extension protruding from the front of the body. The remnants of the animal tendon strings were measured to have a diameter of 0.8 millimeters. Strip-like discolouration on the string carrier allows the conclusion that the harp had five strings that were tied to the string carrier with skin wraps.

The physicist and music archaeologist Bo Lawergren reconstructed a model that was as true to the original as possible based on the excavation find. The attachment of the rod to which the strings were tied instead of under the membrane as usual, caused technical difficulties. In addition, the remaining wooden dowels turned out to be too short to be able to hold the skin on the edge of the body taut. The harp may have been inoperative before it was placed in the grave. The torn membrane could have been fixed with a few wraps of skin strips across the body for repair.

distribution

Horizontal angle harp with nine strings on an Assyrian relief in Nimrud

The Pasyryk harp belongs to a group of horizontal angle harps in Asia, which are classified as "steppe harps" depending on where they were found. In contrast to the vertical harps, these instruments were compact and robust enough to be transported by the nomads on horses. All of them had five strings, which differed from the Assyrian horizontal angle harps with nine strings. Possibly Scythians who served in the Assyrian army brought in in the 8th century BC. Chr. Such harps from Mesopotamia to their Central Asian homeland, whereby in addition to the larger number of strings, the diatonic scales developed in Mesopotamia were forgotten on the way back. The music played in Central Asia was different. Reliefs on the Northwest Palace of Nimrud around 870 BC And at the southwest palace of Niniveh from the 7th century BC. Chr. Show Assyrian musicians who hold the modeled harp type with the body horizontally at hip height to the front. The string carrier is on the side away from the body. With a long opening pick in one hand, the men shown in a side view hit the strings.

In Bashadar, another site belonging to the Pasyryk culture, a man and a woman were buried in wooden coffins in Kurgan II. The shaft grave dates to the middle of the 7th century BC. The grave goods included 14 horses with saddles and bridles. Several of the small remains of a wooden object are interpreted as an angle harp which, according to its excavator Rudenko, could have had 15 strings.

All of the finds of steppe harps are otherwise younger than 500 BC. A find from Olbia in the Ukraine on the western edge of the Eurasian steppe dates from 75 AD. Scythians brought the angle harp to the Chinese border region of Xinjiang , but not further into China. In Xinjiang, harps from the 5th century BC were made in Zaghunluq and Yanghai . Found. Only in the first centuries after Christian did a large number of angle harps reach China via the Silk Road .

East Asian angle harps were most valued from the 6th century under the names konghou in China, gonghu in Korea and kugo in Japan. From the 11th century onwards there were fewer and fewer angle harps all over Asia. The disadvantage is their inadequate strength, which makes tuning even fewer strings cumbersome. The string tension of the Pasyryk harp is inevitably much lower than that of a modern concert harp.

In the Caucasus , angle harps have been around since the 6th century BC, when a small bronze figure was found in Kazbegi on the Georgian Military Road . Proven. Except for the changi still played in the mountain valleys of Svaneti , the Caucasian angular harps have practically disappeared. Its namesake, the Persian Tschang , was preserved on miniature paintings .

literature

  • Bo Lawergren: The Ancient Harp from Pazyryk. In: Contributions to general and comparative archeology. 9-10, 1990, pp. 111-118.
  • Bo Lawergren: The Beginning and End of Angular Harps. In: Ellen Hickmann, Ricardo Eichmann (Hrsg.): Studies on music archeology I. String instruments in an archaeological context. (Orient-Archäologie, Volume 6) Verlag Marie Leidorf, Rahden / Westfalen 2000, pp. 53–64.
  • Bo Lawergren: Angular Harps Through the Ages. A causal history. (PDF; 3.1 MB) In: Arnd Adje Both, Ricardo Eichmann, Ellen Hickmann, Lars-Christian Koch (eds.) Challenges and goals of musical archeology. Papers from the 5th Symposium of the International Study Group on Music Archeology at the Ethnological Museum, State Museums Berlin, September 19–23, 2006. (Orient-Aräologie 22nd Studies on Music Archeology 6) Verlag Marie Leidorf, Rahden / Westfalen 2008 , Pp. 261-281.
  • OR Gurney, Bo Lawergren: Ancient Mesopotamian Terminology for Harps and Sound Holes . In: Ellen Hickmann, David W. Hughes (Eds.): The Archeology of Early Music Cultures. Third International Meeting of the ICTM Study Group on Music Archeology. Publishing house for systematic musicology, Bonn 1988, pp. 175–187.
  • FM Karomatov, VA Meškeris, TS Vyzgo: Central Asia . (Werner Bachmann (Ed.): Music history in pictures . Volume II: Music of antiquity. Delivery 9) Deutscher Verlag für Musik, Leipzig 1987, pp. 50–53.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Wilhelm Stauder: The music of the Sumer, Babylonier and Assyrer. In: Bertold Spuler (Hrsg.): Handbuch der Orientalistik. 1. Dept. The Near and Middle East. Supplementary Volume IV. Oriental Music. EJ Brill, Leiden / Cologne 1970, pp. 174, 215.
  2. ^ Francis W. Galpin: The Music of the Sumerians and their Immediate Successors, the Babylonians and Assyrians. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1937; 2nd unchanged edition: Strasbourg University Press 1955, p. 2f, ISBN 978-0-521-18063-4 .
  3. ^ Francis W. Galpin, p. 29.
  4. ^ Jean During: Drums. Large group of percussion instruments. In: Encyclopædia Iranica .
  5. ↑ VA Meškeris, TS Vyzgo: Central Asia. Pp. 50, 52.
  6. ↑ VA Meškeris, TS Vyzgo: Central Asia. P. 52
  7. ↑ Bo Lawergren: Angular Harps Through the Ages. P. 264 f.
  8. ↑ Bo Lawergren: The Beginning and End of Angular Harps. P.56.