Pandoura
Modern lithograph of a bas relief from Mantineia (4th century BC), exhibited at National Archaeological Museum of Athens. The image shows a muse playing a pandoura, and the original is the oldest image of a pandoura currently known.
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The pandura (Ancient Greek: πανδοῦρα, pandoura) was an ancient Greek string instrument belonging in the broad class of the lute and guitar instruments. Musical instruments of this class have been observed in ancient Greek artwork from the 3rd or 4th century BC onward.
Lute-class instruments were present in Mesopotamia since the Akkadian era, or the third millennium BCE.
The ancient Greek pandoura was a medium or long-necked lute with a small resonating chamber, used by the ancient Greeks. It commonly had three strings: such an instrument was also known as the trichordon (τρίχορδον, McKinnon 1984:10). Its descendants still survive as the Greek tambouras and bouzouki, the North African kuitra, the Eastern Mediterranean saz and the Balkan tamburica and remained popular also in the near east and eastern Europe, too, usually acquiring a third string in the course of time, since the fourth century BCE.
Renato Meucci (1996) suggests that the some Italian Renaissance descendants of Pandura type were called chitarra italiana, mandore or mandola.
Information about Roman pandura-type instruments comes mainly from ancient Roman artwork. Under the Romans the pandura was modified: the long neck was preserved but was made wider to take four strings, and the body was either oval or slightly broader at the base, but without the inward curves of the pear-shaped instruments. The word pandura was rare in classical Latin writers.
There were at least two distinct varieties of pandura. One type was pear-shaped, used in Assyria and Persia. In this type the body had graceful inward curves which led up gradually from base to neck. These curves changed at the bottom end off the instrument to a more sloping outline, an elongated triangle with the corners rounded off. The oval type, a favourite instrument of the Egyptians, was also found in ancient Persia and among the Arabs of North Africa.
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