Terminological problems of Ancient Greek instrument terms

Terminological problems equally arise in archeological and musicological research of ancient Greek music. One field that suffers from this lack of collaboration is organology. Even the shortest paragraphs on ancient Greek music will mention the lyre, the kithara, and the aulos but only a few authors deal with the barely noticeable terminological problem of the string instruments in detail. By comparison of descriptions and illustrations of the latter, we notice great incompatibility. The biggest terminological problem in classifying string instruments is the term lyre that is used generically and for a specific instrument. Since the paragraphs on ancient music in archeological and musicological literature are short and reduced to basic information, this polysemy is rarely mentioned. This makes the reader’s and the researcher’s understanding of the subject difficult. We find terminological problems due to wrong or uncorroborated depictions, but also because of the wrong translations from Greek and other languages. Some authors equate ancient instruments with contemporary to avoid loan-words but instead use various terms. When they use loan-words they rarely italicize them. This work will try to clarify the classification of ancient Greek string instruments by using definitions based on the studied literature and hopefully it will serve for terminology standardization that can be used by translators and researchers