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Encyclopedia Britannica - Main :: PRE-PYR |
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PSALTERY, PSALTERION , Or SAWTRIE (Fr. psalterion, salteire; Ger. Psalterium; Ital. salterio, istrumento di porco), an ancient stringed instrument twanged by fingers or plectrum, and mentioned many times in the English
instrument also during the middle ages in England, France and Italy. It is exceedingly doubtful whether the word was ever applied during the classic Greek period to any individual instrument; there is, moreover, no trace in the monuments of that time of the psalterion in any of the forms in which it afterwards became known during the middle ages. It is also puzzling to find no fewer than four different instruments
Septuagint
loan word from the Greek, corresponds to the Santir, a stringed instrument represented on Assyrian monuments of the 8th century B.C. (when as yet the word had not been used in Greek for a musical instrument) and still in use in Persia at the present day by the same name. The instrument itself, moreover, a dulcimer, which in its earlier forms differed from the psalterion mainly in that its strings were struck by curved sticks instead of being plucked, must in the absence
The medieval psaltery consisted of a shallow box-soundchest over which strings varying in number were stretched, being fastened at one side to pegs and at the other to wrest pins. In the early rectangular form the strings, numbering 10 or 12, were, as in the cithara, of uniform length, the pitch being varied by the thickness and tension of the strings. When the triangular form succeeded the rectangular, the stringing was that of the harp, pitch being dependent on the length. The trapeze
grew
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