1,700-Year-Old Musical Instrument Found, and It Still Works

The mouth harp was recently discovered in the Altai Mountains region of Russia and still makes music after well over a millennium.



By Heather Brady
PUBLISHED JANUARY 11, 2018

An ancient mouth harp discovered in Russia delighted archaeologists when they confirmed that it could still make a sound.

The instrument was one of five mouth harps discovered by archaeologists at two sites, Chultukov Log 9 and Cheremshanka, in the mountainous Altai Republic region of south-central Russia.

"I myself played on the harp from Cheremshanka," says Andrey Borodovsky, a professor at the Institute of Archaeology and Ethnography in the Siberian branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences. He has been researching these instruments for more than 20 years, and says one of the Cheremshanka mouth harps is still capable of making music.

The instruments were likely made by craftsmen from the splintered ribs of cows or horses, and they are thought to date back 1,700 years to the period when the Huns and their descendants controlled much of central Asia. The tribes who populated the region at the time were nomadic, spreading across central Asia through modern-day Mongolia, Kazakhstan, northeast China, and southern Russia. The mouth harp that Borodovsky played is about 4.3 inches long and 3.3 inches wide.

More:
https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2018/01/ancient-musical-instrument-mouth-jaw-harp-siberia-russia-spd/