Replica lyre

The chelys (tortoise-shell) lyre was often used for teaching children music because it was lightweight, affordable and relatively simple to learn, compared to other instruments like the aulos and kithara. The Homeric Hymn to Hermes tells the story of how the first lyre was made by Hermes. He scooped out the marrow out of a mountain tortoise, fixed stalks of reed to the shell and stretched ox hide over it. Then, he attached two horns and a cross piece between them and added strings. The Ure Museum lyre is a modern replica, constructed in a similar manner but with wood instead of horns, as seems to have been the norm (we would probably have been told of by an ancient teacher for our poor attempt at stringing the strings). Few ancient Greek lyres survive because they were made of perishable materials but images of lyres, for example on our Paestan krater, help us to reconstruct them.

See more information at http://uremuseum.org/cgi-bin/ure/uredb.cgi?rec=2002.9.6