Pandura

The pandura (, ''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.

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, 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, 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.

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

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

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.

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. "Pandura" in ''Encyclopædia Britannica'', year 1911.

Mesopotamia

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

Eastern variations

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

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

File:Terracotta Figure of a Woman Playing a Pandoura, Cyprus, circa 300 BC.jpg, Terracotta figure of a woman playing a pandoura, ca. 300 BC, Cyprus ''(British Museum)''
File:Pandoura 002.jpg, Ancient Greek Tanagra figurine, 200 BC.
File:Indo-GreekBanquet.JPG, 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.
File:Estela de Lutatia Lupata (Museo Nacional de Arte Romano).jpg, 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)
File:Guitar-type_instrument_depicted_on_an_ancient_Roman_sarcophagus_in_marble,_British_Museum_number_1805,0703.132.jpg, Detail of a pandura-type instrument from a Roman sarcophagus relief, 3rd century AD ''(British Museum)''
File:Byzantine Pandore.gif, Roman or Byzantine pandoura from a 6th-century A.D. mosaic in the Great Palace of Constantinople. The instrument has three strings.

See also

* Phandar
*Tambouras
*Panduri
* Baglamas
*Bandura
* Tanbur
*Mandolin

References

Citations

Bibliography
*

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''.

{{Greek musical instruments

Ancient Greek musical instruments
Necked lutes