| Fig. 5.—Asiatic Cithara in transition (or rotta). From a fresco at Beni-Hasan (c. 1700 B.C.). | Fig. 6.—Roman Cithara in transition, of the Lycian Apollo (Rome Mus. Capit.). |
The first of these steps produced the rotta (q.v.), by the construction of body, arms and transverse bar in one piece. The Semitic races used the rotta at a very remote period (1700 B.C.), as we know from a fresco at Beni-Hasan, dating from the reign of Senwosri II., which depicts a procession of strangers bringing tribute; among them is a bearded musician of Semitic type bearing a rotta which he holds horizontally in front of him in the Assyrian manner, and quite unlike the Greeks, who always played the lyre and cithara in an upright position. A unique specimen of this rectangular rotta was found in an Alamannic tomb of the 5th or 6th century at Oberflacht in the Black Forest. The instrument was clasped in the arms of an armed knight; it is now preserved in the Völker Museum in Berlin. This old German rotta is an exact counterpart of instruments pictured in illuminated MSS. of the 8th century, and is derived from the cithara with rectangular body, while from the cithara with a body having the curve of the lower half of the violin was produced a rotta with the outline of the body of the guitar. Both types were common in Europe until the 14th century, some played with a bow, others twanged by the fingers, and bearing indifferently both names, cithara and rotta. The addition of a finger-board, stretching like a short neck from body to transverse bar, leaving on each side of the finger-board space for the hand to pass through in order to stop the strings, produced the crwth or crowd (q.v.), and brought about the reduction in the number of the strings to three or four. The conversion of the rotta into the guitar (q.v.) was an easy transition effected by the addition of a long neck to a body derived from the oval rotta. When the bow was applied the result was the guitar or troubadour fiddle. At first the instrument called cithara in the Latin versions of the Psalms was glossed citran, citre in Anglo-Saxon, but in the 11th century the same instrument was rendered hearpan, and in French and English harpe or harp, and our modern versions have retained this translation. The cittern (q.v.), a later descendant of the cithara, although preserving the characteristic features of the cithara, the shallow sound-chest with ribs, adopted the pear-shaped outline of the Eastern instruments of the lute tribe.
(K. S.)
[1] A drawing of an Egyptian cithara, similar to the Leiden specimen, may be seen in Champollion, Monuments de l’Égypte et de la Nubie, ii. pl. 175.
[2] See Plutarch, Apophthegm. Lacon.
[3] Philostratus the Elder, Imagines, No. 10, “Amphion,” and Philostratus the Younger, Imagines, No. 7, “Orpheus,” p. 403.
[4] Tibullus, Eleg. iii. 4. 39.
[5] Le Antichità de Ercolano, vol. iii. p. 5.
[6] Idem, vol. iv. p. 201.