History of the classical guitar

Before the development of the electric guitar and the use of synthetic materials, a guitar was defined as being an instrument having "a long, fretted neck, flat wooden soundboard, ribs, and a flat back, most often with incurved sides".[1] The term is used to refer to a number of related instruments that were developed and used across Europe beginning in the 12th century and, later, in the Americas.[2] These instruments are descended from ones that existed in ancient central Asia and India. For this reason guitars are distantly related to modern instruments from these regions, including the tanbur, the setar, and the sitar. The oldest known iconographic representation of an instrument displaying the essential features of a guitar is a 3,300 year old stone carving of a Hittite bard.[3]

The modern word guitar, and its antecedents, have been applied to a wide variety of cordophones since ancient times and as such is the cause of confusion. The English word guitar, the German gitarre, and the French guitare were adopted from the Spanish guitarra, which comes from the Andalusian Arabic قيثارةر qitara,[4] itself derived from the Latin cithara, which in turn came from the Ancient Greek κιθάρα kithara,[5] which ultimately (directly or indirectly) traces back to the Old Persian سی تار sihtar "three-stringed

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