The history of music in Britain may be 1000 years older than originally thought.
Archaeologists have found what could be the remains of Europe’s oldest stringed instrument.
A small wooden fragment thought to be from a 2300-year-old lyre was found at an excavation site in High Pasture Cave on the isle of Skye.
Music archaeologists Dr Graeme Lawson and Dr John Purser studied the piece and said the notches where strings would have been placed are easy to distinguish on the artefact, despite it being been burnt and broken.
Dr Lawson, of Cambridge Music-archaeological Research, said: “For Scotland, and indeed all of us in these islands, this is very much a step-change.
“It pushes the history of complex music back more than a thousand years into our darkest pre-history. And not only the history of music but, more specifically, of song and poetry because that’s what such instruments were very often used for.
“The earliest known lyres date from about 5000 years ago in what is now Iraq, and these were already complicated and finely made structures. But here in Europe even Roman traces proved hard to locate. Pictures maybe but no actual remains.”
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'Europe's oldest stringed instrument' discovered on Scots island
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