Ongoing History: Musical instruments lost to history

Today, we tend to think of instruments like guitars, bass, drums and keyboards.  If we want to go a little further, there’s brass (like trumpets and saxophones), traditional stringed instruments–violins, cellos–and woodwinds–oboes, flutes, and the like.

But have you ever heard of an epigonion?  If you were in a band in ancient Greece and you had one of these things, you were the equivalent of–well, you were somewhere between the guitarist and the keyboard player.  You had to be very good at playing this thing because it had 40 strings and could be plucked in 127 defined ways.

And if your band existed 3500 years ago, you might have played the barbiton.  That would have made you the bass player.  Out front would have been the dude on the phormix, which would have made him the guitarist.

Scientists are still working out how these things might have sounded.