Pandura

Not to be confused with Pandur.

The pandura (Ancient Greek: πανδοῦρα, pandoura) or pandore, an ancient Greek string instrument, belonged in the broad class of the lute and guitar instruments. Akkadians played similar instruments from the 3rd millennium BC. Ancient Greek artwork depicts such lutes from the 3rd or 4th century BC onward.

Pandura

Muse playing a pandoura, detail of a bas relief from Mantineia, 4th century BC (NAMA)
Classification	Necked lutes String instruments
Related instruments
Angélique (instrument) Archlute Barbat (lute) Bağlama (Saz) Baglamas Bouzouki Byzantine Lyra Charango Chitarra Italiana Dombra Domra Dutar Lute Mandolin Oud Pandura Panduri Phandar Tambura Tambouras Tanbur Tanbur (Turkish) Tembûr Theorbo Tiorbino

Ancient Greece

The ancient Greek pandoura was a medium or long-necked lute with a small resonating chamber, used by the ancient Greeks. It commonly had three strings: such an instrument was also known as the trichordon (three-stringed) (τρίχορδον, McKinnon 1984:10). Its descendants still survive as the Kartvelian panduri, the Greek tambouras and bouzouki,^[1][2] the North African kuitra, the Eastern Mediterranean saz and the Balkan tamburica and remained popular also in the near east and eastern Europe, too, usually acquiring a third string in the course of time,^[3] since the fourth century BC.

Renato Meucci (1996) suggests that the some Italian Renaissance descendants of pandura type were called chitarra italiana, mandore or mandola.

Origins of the name pandura

The name dates back to the origins of stringed instruments, when the archery-bow had a resonator added (becoming a musical bow) and was straightened to become a lute.^[4]

In Sumerian a "bow" (as in bow and arrow or musical bow) or arched harp was giš.ban.^[5] When the adjective "tur" (small) was added it became gišban.tur and denoted the "musical instrument smaller than the hunting-bow."^[5] That would also "differentiate it from larger musical instruments."^[5]

Ban.tur became the "small bow".^[6] When the bow was straightened out (turning it into a lute) the instrument created "may have kept the name", ban.tur.^[7] That instrument "eventually led to the pandura.^[7]

This is not to say that the pandura is the first of all the lutes with similar names; pandura was one of many names coming from the original Sumerian ban.tur, including tambur or tanbur.^[8]

Roman

Information about Roman pandura-type instruments comes mainly from ancient Roman artwork. Under the Romans the pandura was modified: the long neck was preserved but was made wider to take four strings, and the body was either oval or slightly broader at the base, but without the inward curves of the pear-shaped instruments.^[9] The word pandura was rare in classical Latin writers.^[10]

Mesopotamia

Lute-class instruments were present in Mesopotamia since the Akkadian era, or the third millennium BC.^[11]

Eastern variations

There were at least two distinct varieties of pandura.^[9] One type was pear-shaped, used in Assyria and Persia.^[9] In this type the body had graceful inward curves which led up gradually from base to neck.^[9] These curves changed at the bottom end off the instrument to a more sloping outline, an elongated triangle with the corners rounded off.^[9] The oval type, a favourite instrument of the Egyptians, was also found in ancient Persia and among the Arabs of North Africa.^[9]

Caucasus

From the ancient Greek word pandoura, a comparable instrument is found in modern Chechnya and Ingushetia, where it is known as phandar. In Georgia the panduri is a three-string fretted instrument. The modern Georganian panduri instrument is in the tanbur class.

Gallery

• 
  Terracotta figure of a woman playing a pandoura, ca. 300 BC, Cyprus (British Museum)
• 
  Ancient Greek Tanagra figurine, 200 BC.
• 
  Short lute-family instrument on a Hellenistic-style plaster sculpture made in Hadda, Afghanistan and now at the Guimet Museum in Paris. Estimated date 1st-2nd century AD.
• 
  Memorial stele for a 16-year-old Roman woman, shown playing a pandurium, 2nd century AD, from Emerita Augusta, Hispania (Museo Nacional de Arte Romano, Mérida, Spain)^[12][13][14]
• 
  Detail of a pandura-type instrument from a Roman sarcophagus relief, 3rd century AD (British Museum)^[15]
• 
  Roman or Byzantine pandoura from a 6th-century A.D. mosaic in the Great Palace of Constantinople. The instrument has three strings.^[16]

See also

See also: Lute § History and evolution of the lute

• Phandar
• Tambouras
• Panduri
• Baglamas
• Bandura
• Tanbur
• Mandolin

References

Citations

1. "Ταμπουράς" [Tabouras], Museum Of Greek Popular Musical Instruments (in Greek), archived from the original on April 9, 2016
2. Jeffreys, Elizabeth; Haldon, John; Cormack, Robin, eds. (2008), The Oxford Handbook of Byzantine Studies, Oxford: Oxford University Press, p. 928, ISBN 978-0-19925-246-6; Maliaras, Nikos (2007), Byzantina mousika organa [Byzantine musical instruments], Athens: Papagregoriou-Nakas, ISBN 978-9-60755-444-4 EPN 1023; and Digenis Akritas, Escorial version, vv. 826-827, ed. and transl. Elizabeth Jeffreys.
3. Ammer, Christine (2004). The Facts on File Dictionary of Music (4th ed.). Infobase Publishing. p. 298. ISBN 978-1-4381-3009-5.
4. Dumbrill, Richard J. (2005). The Archaeomusicology of the Ancient Near East. Victoria, British Columbia: Trafford Publishing. pp. 308–310, 319. ISBN 978-1-4120-5538-3. [note: pages 308-310 address the development of the lute, page 319 addresses the application of the name to it]
5. Dumbrill, Richard J. (2005). The Archaeomusicology of the Ancient Near East. Victoria, British Columbia: Trafford Publishing. pp. 180–181. ISBN 978-1-4120-5538-3.
6. Dumbrill, Richard J. (2005). The Archaeomusicology of the Ancient Near East. Victoria, British Columbia: Trafford Publishing. p. 237. ISBN 978-1-4120-5538-3.
7. Dumbrill, Richard J. (2005). The Archaeomusicology of the Ancient Near East. Victoria, British Columbia: Trafford Publishing. p. 319. ISBN 978-1-4120-5538-3.
8. Dumbrill, Richard J. (2005). The Archaeomusicology of the Ancient Near East. Victoria, British Columbia: Trafford Publishing. pp. 319–320. ISBN 978-1-4120-5538-3. The long-necked lute in the OED is orthographed as tambura; tambora, tamera, tumboora; tambur(a) and tanpoora. We have an Arabic Õunbur; Persian tanbur; Armenian pandir; Georgian panturi. and a Serbo-Croat tamburitza. The Greeks called it pandura; panduros; phanduros; panduris or pandurion. The Latin is pandura. It is attested as a Nubian instrument in the third century BC. The earliest literary allusion to lutes in Greece comes from Anaxilas in his play The Lyre-maker as 'trichordos'. ... According to Pollux, the trichordon (sic) was Assyrian and they gave it the name pandoura. ... These instruments survive today in the form of the various Arabian tunbar.
9. "Pandura" in Encyclopædia Britannica, year 1911.
10. Search for word pandura at "Classical Latin Texts", a website that is able to boast: "This website contains essentially all Latin literary texts written before A.D. 200, as well as some texts selected from later antiquity." Pandura is very rare as a word in classical Latin texts, but pandura-type instruments are not very rare in ancient Roman artwork. This raises the question: what then did the ancient Romans call it? Classical Latin cithara meant a lyre-type instrument at least sometimes, but sometimes it meant any plucked string musical instrument, and it seems very probable that the pandura was called by the name cithara in classical Latin at least sometimes. The classical Latin dictionary of Lewis and Short translates Classical Latin cithara as English "cithara, cithern, guitar, or lute". See Lewis, Charlton T.; Short, Charles (1879). "cithara". A Latin Dictionary; Founded on Andrews' edition of Freund's Latin dictionary. Oxford: Trustees of Tufts University. Retrieved 8 January 2018.
11. Hassan, Scheherezade Qassim; Morris, R. Conway; Baily, John; During, Jean (2001). "Tanbūr". In Sadie, Stanley; Tyrrell, John (eds.). The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians. Vol. XXV (2nd ed.). London: Macmillan. pp. 61–62.
12. "Photograph of the museum information sign for the stele". Flickr. 25 September 2012. Retrieved 8 January 2018.
13. Edmondson, Jonathan; Basarrate, Trinidad Nogales; Trillmich, Walter (2001). Imagen y memoria: Monumentos funerarios con retratos en la colonia Augusta Emerita (in Spanish). Real Academia de la Historia. p. 144. ISBN 978-84-89512-92-4.
14. "Estela de Lutatia Lupata". Museo Nacional de Arte Romano. Retrieved 8 January 2018. La joven LUTATIA toca un instrumento de cuerda, tipo "pandarium"... [translation: The young LUTATIA plays a stringed instrument, "pandarium" type]
15. "Sarcophagus (1805,0703.132)". The British Museum. Retrieved 8 January 2018. The sarcophagus is in The British Museum, which says it was uncovered near Rome and was probably made in Rome itself, and date-estimates it 3rd century AD.
16. Brett, Gerard (1942). "The Mosaic of the Great Palace in Constantinople". The Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes. 5: 34–43. doi:10.2307/750447. JSTOR 750447. Farmer, Henry George (1949). "An Early Greek Pandore". The Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society. 1 (2): 177–179. doi:10.1017/S0035869X0010293X. JSTOR 25222335. The instrument is a three-stringed pandoura...

Bibliography

• McKinnon, J. W. (1984). "Pandoura". In Sadie, S. (ed.). The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians. Vol. 3. London: Macmillan Press. p. 10.

External links

• Picture of a pandura, originally published 1947 in the book The Great Palace of the Byzantine Emperors by David Talbot Rice. Henry George Farmer calls the instrument "a three-stringed pandoura" in his 1949 article An Early Greek Pandore.
• Website that has a history of Pandura with some good photos.