It is a scary thing to consider, but for most of human history people have lived their whole lives without ever having had the chance to plug their axe into their stack and shred some mad licks. If we go back in time, to a period in the dim and distant past, approximately 4000 years before the invention of the Floyd Rose tremolo bridge and of hot pink leopard print spandex pants, we start to see the very first ancestors of the electric guitar to be found by archaeologists.
The very first stringed instrument with a neck and body was a bowl harp, found in ancient egypt, sumeria and babylon. It was a fairly crude instrument, consisting of a stick, bent under tension from the strings, with a tortoise shell or a carved wooden body. The strings were made from silk or from animal gut, and were probably plucked with the fingers. The strings were simply tied to each end of the instrument, making tuning a rather haphazard affair and as there was no way to fret or otherwise shorten the string, the player was limited to one note for each string. If the player wanted more notes, they needed more strings – a situation similar in this regard to a modern-day piano or harp.
Slightly more guitar-like was the tanbur, found in the same region. The tanbur was a more sophisticated development from the bowl harp, and some of them had a long, fairly flat, fretted neck, and a flat wooden body. These tanburs could be plucked with a plectrum or with a fingernail, making them not too dissimilar to the guitars and banjos we are familiar with today. Dating to around 3000 years ago, these instruments are probably the ultimate vintage guitars. And like most vintage guitars, people accustomed to learning guitar on current production instruments will probably find most of them rather unplayable.
Fretted instruments took a little longer to arrive in europe. The Moors in Spain brought their Oud to Spain. The oud was a short, thin necked fretless instrument with many strings, a sharply angled peghead and a large, round body. The europeans added frets to the oud, calling it a “lute”. Guitars did not descend directly from lutes, however the lute was a forerunner of the guitar in european music, and much early classical guitar music was rearranged from lute scores. Centuries before the Scorpions rocked you like a hurricane, lute players could be considered among the first rock stars of old europe: lute players were a common subject of rennaissance painting, and were depicted elaborately dressed, often with tight pants and long hair.
While the lute had the role of the guitar in european music, the direct ancestors of the electric guitar come from further away, in Central Asia. The name “guitar” has its roots in Sanskrit, the old tongue from which the languages of northern India and Central Asia originated. The ancient Sanskrit word “string” was “tar”, and stringed folk instruments were named for the number of strings they had. A two-stringed instrument was known as a dotar, from the Sanskrit “dvi”, meaning two. A three stringed instrument was called a setar, which with the addition of numerous other strings became the indian sitar while a five stringed one was known as a panchtar. It is the four stringed chartar, with it’s long fretted neck, narrow waisted flat body, and tuning pegs on a slightly angled headstock that arrived in Spain and became known as the chitarra, which over the course of centuries eventually developed into the electric guitar we know and shred today.