Bull-Headed Lyre of Ur

Overview

The Bull-Headed Lyre of Ur is among the oldest surviving stringed instruments anywhere on the planet. It was excavated in 1926-27 from the Royal Cemetery at Ur in modern Iraq by the joint University of Pennsylvania / British Museum expedition led by Sir Leonard Woolley, and dates from the Early-Dynastic-III period of Sumerian civilisation, approximately 2550 to 2450 BCE. The instrument is now held at Penn Museum (the Penn Museum (formally the University of Pennsylvania’s archaeology and anthropology museum)) in Philadelphia, where it has been part of the collection since the 1929 partition of the Ur excavation finds.

The lyre takes its name from the magnificent sculpted bull’s head — originally covered in gold leaf with eyes and beard of lapis lazuli — that decorates the front of the soundbox.

Origin & History

Woolley’s 1926-27 season at the Royal Cemetery at Ur opened “The King’s Grave” (PG 789), one of the most spectacular finds of early-20th-century archaeology. The grave contained the body of an unidentified ruler accompanied by over sixty accompanying soldiers and attendants who had apparently been put to death and buried alongside their lord — one of the few directly documented cases of mass retainer sacrifice in the ancient Near East. The Bull-Headed Lyre lay among the offerings.

The Royal Cemetery yielded several lyres and harps in the same period; the Bull-Headed Lyre is the most famous and the best preserved. Three other major lyres from the cemetery — the Silver Lyre and two harps — were divided between Penn Museum, the British Museum, and the Iraq Museum in Baghdad under the standard 1920s partage system. The Iraq Museum lyre was severely damaged during the looting that followed the 2003 invasion of Iraq, with the gold bull’s head torn off and stolen; some elements were later recovered.

The Penn Museum’s Bull-Headed Lyre was carefully conserved upon arrival in Philadelphia and has undergone several rounds of restoration over the decades as conservation techniques have improved. The wood of the original soundbox had largely decayed in the ground; the surviving instrument is a careful reconstruction around the surviving inlaid panel and bull’s head.

Construction & Materials

The lyre consists of three main parts: a wooden soundbox, a quadripartite inlaid front panel, and the sculpted bull’s head. The bull’s head is carved wood overlaid with gold leaf, with eyes and beard of lapis lazuli. The inlaid panel below the bull’s head shows four registers of mythological and ritual scenes — including a famous image of a hero embracing two human-faced bulls, and animals serving food and music in a banquet scene — executed in shell, lapis lazuli, and red limestone set into bitumen.

The reconstructed soundbox is wood. The original strings are not preserved; on the basis of comparative evidence and surviving lyre images on Sumerian seals and reliefs, the instrument is generally reconstructed with eleven strings, though estimates range from eight to thirteen. The strings would have been gut or twisted plant fibre, attached to a horizontal yoke at the top of the instrument.

How It’s Played

The Sumerian bull-headed lyre is held vertically in front of the seated player and plucked with both hands. Surviving images on Sumerian seals and reliefs show the player seated with the lyre resting on the ground or on a low stand, the bull’s head facing outward. The strings are tuned by adjusting their position and tension at the upper yoke; the absence of pegs or screws means the original tuning system was simpler than later harp and lyre traditions.

The original playing technique is unknown. Modern reconstructions — most prominently the Lyre Ensemble led by Andy Lowings, which has built a playing copy of the Iraq Museum lyre and tours it widely — propose a finger-and-plectrum technique informed by the Sumerian iconography and by surviving cuneiform tablets that record musical theory and what appear to be tuning instructions for similar instruments. Real performance is necessarily speculative; the instrument provides the materials but not the music.

Cultural Significance

The Bull-Headed Lyre is direct material evidence of the centrality of music to Sumerian royal culture. Utu/Shamash, the Mesopotamian sun deity was often depicted in bull form, particularly at sunrise, and the lapis lazuli beard suggests the bull head represents a divine figure associated with the king’s authority. The Penn Museum has argued that the instrument was both a musical and a ritual object, with the bull head functioning as much as a divine emblem as as decoration.

The lyre is also one of the central exhibits documenting the wider Mesopotamian musical tradition, which produced the world’s oldest known musical notation (the Hurrian hymn texts of Ugarit, c. 1400 BCE) and the world’s oldest documented music theory (Babylonian cuneiform tablets describing string tunings and intervals). The Royal Cemetery lyres preceded these textual sources by a thousand years; the Bull-Headed Lyre therefore stands at the start of the long Mesopotamian musical tradition that connects, through Egypt and the Levant, to the Greek lyre and ultimately to all later European stringed-instrument families.

Notable Examples & Recordings

• The instrument itself is on display at Penn Museum in Philadelphia.
• The Lyre Ensemble (UK, founded 2003 by Andy Lowings) has built a playing reconstruction of the Iraq Museum’s “Golden Lyre of Ur” and has toured it internationally; their recordings are the closest available approximation to how the instrument may have sounded.
• Comparative reconstructions are held at the British Museum (Royal Cemetery at Ur gallery) and at the Iraq Museum in Baghdad (the surviving fragments and a reconstructed instrument).

Related Instruments

• Lyre — the broader category of yoke-stringed lap or lap-stand instruments to which the Ur lyre belongs.
• Greek lyre — the later classical-Mediterranean descendant of the same family.
• Kithara — the larger ancient Greek concert lyre.
• Anglo-Saxon lyre — the Germanic medieval yoke lyre, essentially the same design 3,500 years later.
• Tagelharpa — the Scandinavian bowed-yoke-lyre survivor, a related typological category.
• Trinity College Harp — a later museum-grade string instrument of comparable historical significance.
• Queen Mary Harp — another museum-grade medieval string instrument.

Where to Hear It

The instrument is on permanent display at Penn Museum, Philadelphia, in the Middle East gallery. The Lyre Ensemble’s recordings of their reconstruction of the Iraq Museum lyre give the closest available impression of how the original instruments may have sounded. The British Museum’s Mesopotamia galleries display closely related lyres from the same Royal Cemetery excavation.

• Wikipedia: Bull-Headed Lyre of Ur
• Wikidata: Bull-Headed Lyre of Ur (Q65091764)
• DBpedia: Bull-Headed Lyre of Ur
• Penn Museum collection

Learning Resources

Scholarly study of the Royal Cemetery lyres draws on Leonard Woolley’s Ur Excavations volumes (1934 onward), Penn Museum’s published catalogues, the British Museum’s online collection, and the work of Anne Draffkorn Kilmer and others on Mesopotamian music theory. The Lyre Ensemble (UK) provides accessible documentation of modern reconstruction practice.

Frequently Asked Questions

How old is the Bull-Headed Lyre of Ur?
Approximately 4,500 years — dated to the Early-Dynastic-III period of Sumerian civilisation, c. 2550 to 2450 BCE.

Where is it now?
At Penn Museum (the Penn Museum (formally the University of Pennsylvania’s archaeology and anthropology museum)) in Philadelphia.

How was it discovered?
By the joint University of Pennsylvania and British Museum expedition led by Sir Leonard Woolley at the Royal Cemetery at Ur, modern Iraq, during the 1926-27 excavation season. It was found in “The King’s Grave” alongside more than sixty sacrificed attendants.

Can it be played?
The original instrument has not been played in modern times — the surviving wood is too fragile and the original strings are long gone. Modern reconstructions of similar Royal Cemetery lyres have been built and are played by groups including the Lyre Ensemble.

Is it the oldest string instrument in the world?
It is among the very oldest known surviving string instruments. The musical bow tradition is older still (rock-art evidence from southern Africa goes back at least 15,000 years), but as a complex constructed string instrument with multiple strings, the Royal Cemetery lyres are the oldest physically preserved examples currently known.