A quick trip over to the Early Music Festival today, held in the gorgeous surroundings of the Wren-architected Royal Naval College in Greenwich.

The exhibition was suitably packed with the expected collections of lutes, viols, cornets, crumhorns, harpsichords and more different flavours of recorders and flutes than you could imagine. Many of the instruments are simply beautiful: early music people seem to take the aesthetics of their instruments far more seriously than the rest of us.

But one exhibit trumped the lot: the Golden Lyre of Ur. In 1929, archaeologists unearthed the remnants of three lyres in a grave site at the ancient city of Ur (in modern Iraq). They're thought to be the earliest examples of stringed instruments, dated at around 2500 BC. Inspired by this, a team of Brits decided to make a playable copy of the largest of these, and this was on show at the Festival. They tour the country displaying it, and the instrument is even going to be played at a concert in December at London's Bolivar Hall.

This is the lowest register version of the instrument, and therefore quite large (several feet high and several feet wide): the idea is presumably that you play it like a harp. The whole thing is really quite spectacular, complete with golden bull's head and elaborate decoration on the arms - fit for a king's tomb.

For pure age, this doesn't beat the fifty-thousand year old bone flute mentioned by Dan Levitin (see my earlier blog), but it has to be the most extraordinary example of high music culture in so early a civilisation - and I take my hat off to the people who had the madcap idea of actually making a real one!

You can read more at http://www.lyre-of-ur.com/.

14th November 2008