the others have been dubbed the golden lyre, the bull-headed lyre and the silver lyre. At about 4,500 years old, these harps are the world's oldest stringed instruments ever discovered.

The bull lyre is one of three excavated from the royal cemetery of Ur. Each lyre had a different animal head protruding from the front of the sound box to denote its pitch: the bull lyre was bass, the ...

The process of reconstructing the bull lyre proved a difficult and time-consuming job, and given the lack of detailed textual information, I relied heavily on pictures of the lyre housed in the ...