LYRE

A musical instrument of the greatest antiquity among the Egyptians and Greeks. Tradition attributes its invention to the accident of finding on the banks of the Nile a tortoise, whose flesh was entirely decomposed, but whose tendons, having been dried and stretched by the sun's rays, were capable, on being struck, of yielding musical sounds. Hermes, the finder of this tortoise, having made an instrument in imitation of it, is supposed thus to have been the inventor of the lyre. The Greeks attribute the invention to their Hermes (Mercury), the son of Jupiter and Maia. It is generally considered that the original/Egyptian lyre was only of three strings, and that the Grigek Mercury improved upon the invention; that the Muses clubbed together to add one string, Orpheus, Linus, and Thomyris adding one each, thus forming it altogether into an heptachord, or seven stringed lyre. At a later period the lyre consisted of eleven strings, which were made of the sinews of animals; its body was hollow to increase the volume of tone; and it was played with the plectrum or lyre-stick of ivory or polished wood, and sometimes with the fingers like the harp. It went by the diiferent names of lyra, phorminx, chalys, barbitos, barb it on, cithara. LYRE BIRD, or [s. 702]