Guitar History

Before the development of the electric guitar and the use of synthetic materials, a guitar was defined as being an instrument having "a long, fretted neck, flat wooden soundboard, ribs, and a flat back, most often with incurved sides".[1] The term is used to refer to a number of such related instruments that were developed and used across Europe in the modern era.[2] Some types of guitars, which are themselves related to these European instruments, originated in the Americas. These instruments are themselves descended from instruments that once existed in ancient central Asia and India. For this reason guitars are distantly related to contemporary instruments from these regions, including the tanbur, the setar and the sitar, among others. The oldest known iconographic representation of an instrument displaying the essential features of a guitar is a 3,300 year old stone carving of a Hittite bard.[3] The modern word, guitar, was adopted into English from Spanish guitarra (German Gitarre, French Guitare),[4] loaned from the medieval Andalusian Arabic qitara[5], itself derived from the Latin cithara, which in turn came from the earlier Greek word kithara,[6] a descendant of Old Persian sihtar (Tar means string in Persian).[7]