Life is very challenging especially when you're being a student..there would be times when you're happy and times when you'll get sad and depressed..therefore we should know how to contain it and handle it in the best way..some people handle their depression by eating, or watching movies, or even calling someone they love and care..to me, music would be the best way to handle my depression..and what I'd like to talk about is about a musical instrument which is common in our life, the guitar..it's really nice to know how to play one and it gets better when you could sing along either by yourself or with your friends..now, do any of you wonder when was guitar first created, or even how it was made..so before we know the guitar nowadays, let's look about the history of it back in those days, shall we?

The Ancestors

The earliest stringed instruments known to archaeologists are bowl harps and tanburs. Since prehistory people have made bowl harps using tortoise shells and calabashes as resonators, with a bent stick for a neck and one or more gut or silk strings. The world's museums contain many such "harps" from the ancient Sumerian, Babylonian, and Egyptian civilisations. Around 2500 - 2000 CE more advanced harps, such as the opulently carved 11-stringed instrument with gold decoration found in Queen Shub-Ad's tomb, started to appear.

A tanbur is defined as "a long-necked stringed instrument with a small egg- or pear-shaped body, with an arched or round back, usually with a soundboard of wood or hide, and a long, straight neck". The tanbur probably developed from the bowl harp as the neck was straightened out to allow the string/s to be pressed down to create more notes. Tomb paintings and stone carvings in Egypt testify to the fact that harps and tanburs (together with flutes and percussion instruments) were being played in ensemble 3500 - 4000 years ago.

 Archaeologists have also found many similar relics in the ruins of the ancient Persian and Mesopotamian cultures. Many of these instruments have survived into modern times in almost unchanged form, as witness the folk instruments of the region like the Turkish saz, Balkan tamburitsa, Iranian setar, Afghan panchtar and Greek bouzouki.

At 3500 years old, this is the ultimate vintage guitar! It belonged to the Egyptian singer Har-Mose. He was buried with his tanbur close to the tomb of his employer, Sen-Mut, architect to Queen Hatshepsut, who was crowned in 1503 BCE. Sen-Mut (who, it is suspected, was far more than just chief minister and architect to the queen) built Hatshepsuts beautiful mortuary temple, which stands on the banks of the Nile to this day.

Har-Moses instrument had three strings and a plectrum suspended from the neck by a cord. The soundbox was made of beautifully polished cedarwood and had a rawhide "soundboard". It can be seen today at the Archaeological Museum in Cairo.

Queen Hatshepsut

What is a guitar, anyway?

To distinguish guitars from other members of the tanbur family, we need to define what a guitar is. Dr. Kasha defines a guitar as having "a long, fretted neck, flat wooden soundboard, ribs, and a flat back, most often with incurved sides".

The oldest known iconographical representation of an instrument displaying all the essential features of a guitar is a stone carving at Alaca Huyuk in Turkey, of a 3300 year old Hittite "guitar" with "a long fretted neck, flat top, probably flat back, and with strikingly incurved sides".

The Lute (Al'ud, Oud)

The Moors brought the oud to Spain. The tanbur had taken another line of development in the Arabian countries, changing in its proportions and remaining fretless.

The Europeans added frets to the oud and called it a "lute" - this derives from the Arabic "Al'ud" (literally "the wood"), via the Spanish name "laud".

A lute or oud is defined as a "short-necked instrument with many strings, a large pear-shaped body with highly vaulted back, and an elaborate, sharply angled peghead".

It is hard to see how the guitar - with "a long, fretted neck, flat wooden soundboard, ribs, and a flat back, most often with incurved sides" - could possibly have evolved from the lute, with its "short neck with many strings, large pear-shaped body with highly vaulted back, and elaborate, sharply angled peghead".

Dotar

two = Sanskrit "dvi" - modern Persian "do" -

dotar, two-string instrument found in Turkestan

three = Sanskrit "tri" - modern Persian "se" -

setar, 3-string instrument, found in Persia (Iran),

(cf. sitar, India, elaborately developed, many-stringed)

four = Sanskrit "chatur" - modern Persian "char" -

chartar, 4-string instrument, Persia (most commonly known as "tar" in modern usage)

(cf. quitarra, early Spanish 4-string guitar,

modern Arabic qithara, Italian chitarra, etc)

five = Sanskrit "pancha" - modern Persian "panj" -

panchtar, 5 strings, Afghanistan

Indian Sitar

The Indian sitar almost certainly took its name from the Persian setar, but over the centuries the Indians developed it into a completely new instrument, following their own aesthetic and cultural ideals.

Persian Setar

Chartar "tar"

 6 string guitar

The modern "classical" guitar took its present form when the Spanish maker Antonio Torres increased the size of the body, altered its proportions, and introduced the revolutionary "fan" top bracing pattern, in around 1850. His design radically improved the volume, tone and projection of the instrument, and very soon became the accepted construction standard. It has remained essentially unchanged, and unchallenged, to this day.

Steel-string and electric guitars

At around the same time that Torres started making his breakthrough fan-braced guitars in Spain, German immigrants to the USA - among them Christian Fredrich Martin - had begun making guitars with X-braced tops. Steel strings first became widely available in around 1900. Steel strings offered the promise of much louder guitars, but the increased tension was too much for the Torres-style fan-braced top. A beefed-up X-brace proved equal to the job, and quickly became the industry standard for the flat-top steel string guitar.

At the end of the 19th century Orville Gibson was building archtop guitars with oval sound holes. He married the steel-string guitar with a body constructed more like a cello, where the bridge exerts no torque on the top, only pressure straight down. This allows the top to vibrate more freely, and thus produce more volume. In the early 1920's designer Lloyd Loar joined Gibson, and refined the archtop "jazz" guitar into its now familiar form with f-holes, floating bridge and cello-type tailpiece.

The electric guitar was born when pickups were added to Hawaiian and "jazz" guitars in the late 1920's, but met with little success before 1936, when Gibson introduced the ES150 model, which Charlie Christian made famous.

And there we have it..some history of a beautiful instrument..hopefully you guys could have a try at playing guitar and feel the amusement of the sounds produced when you pluck or strum the guitar..it feels kind of hard when you start learning but as time pass by, you could see the progress and it sure does feels awesome when you could play one song..so take your time and make the best out of your life..