Early Egyptian drawings show stringed instruments that resemble very complex lyres and harps. Ancient Rome was heavily influenced by Egyptian culture, and as a result there were many versions of these two instruments in early Western cultures. Around a. d. 400, for instance, the Romans brought their tanbur, also known as the cithara, to Spain.

The Greeks had a stringed instrument call the kithera. Though the spelling is close to the word chitara, it is not a direct ancestor of the modern-day guitar. The kithera is closer to a lyre or harp.

Varying types of stringed instruments developed in the pre-Christian Babylonian, Egyptian, and Hittite cultures of the Middle East as well as in the Roman Italy, Greece, and Turkey in the Near East. All these instruments had certain aspects in common. Each had some sort of sound box and a long neck. Cords or strings were stretched down the neck and over the sound box. Players used one hand to strum (perhaps with a plectrum, or pick, of some sort) and the other to stop the strings at various points along the neck; as a result, they could sound a wide variety of notes, both singly and together.

Medieval Europe

In the early Middle Ages, as the Moors passed through Egypt on their way to conquer North Africa and Spain, they brought the ud, a direct antecedent of the guitar, to Western Europe. The Moorish influence in Spain prepared the groundwork for the development of the guitar in Europe. By the thirteenth century, references to and pictures of guitar-like instruments begin to appear in historic documents from all over Europe.

The Four-Course Guitar

It is possible that makers of the Roman-style cithara and the Arabic ud influenced one another. By A.D. 1200, the four-string guitar had evolved into two types: the guitarra morisca (Moorish guitar), which had a rounded pear-shaped back, a wide fingerboard, and several sound holes somewhat like a lute; and the guitarra latina (Latin guitar), which resembled a small version of the modern guitar, with one sound hole and a narrower neck. On either of these instruments, each pair of strings was called a course.

The guitar has many forebears and cousins — the lute, the Middle Eastern oud, the Indian sitar, the banjo, the koto of Japan, the bouzouki of Greece, the vihuela, the yue-chin, chirar, balalaika, rehab, kayakeum, santir, ombi, vambi, nanga, shamisen … and so on.

In 1487, a musical theorist named Johannes Tinctoris described an instrument he called the guiterra or the ghiterna, whose sides were “tortoise-shaped.” Guitar historians today believe that what Tinctoris actually saw was a round-back lute. In Italy, these instruments were known as the viola da mano and chitarra.

The Six-Course Guitar

While the guiterra was small and had four courses, the Italian chitarra was larger, with six courses. Both had thongs or cords tied at various places along the neck to make frets or squared-off divisions of the neck. These two instruments became the favorites of wandering troubadours or minstrels.

These virtual one-man bands had to master a variety of instruments, including pipes, whistles, and flutes, plus perform songs, tell stories, and provide any other form of entertainment that would earn them money and keep them from facing the displeasure of aggravated patrons.

Here's how an eleventh-century Swiss poet named Amarcius described a minstrel's performance: “When the citharist appears, after arranging for his fee, and proceeds to remove his instrument from its cover of oxhide, the people assemble from far and near, fix their eyes upon him and listen with soft murmurs as he strikes the strings with his fingers stretched far apart, strings which he himself has fashioned from sheep gut, and which he plays now tenderly, now with harsh booming sounds.”

A keen musician himself (and rumored to be the composer of “Greensleeves”), King Henry VIII had more than twenty guitars among his collection of musical instruments in Hampton Court Palace.

The Lute

The lute held court as the major stringed instrument for a long while, but it had a number of drawbacks. First of all, there was no standard lute, so some were large and some smaller. Some had eight strings, while others had twelve or even more. They were difficult to balance and play, and forget about keeping one in tune!

Soon after the reign of King Henry VIII, around 1550, the guitar became one of England's more popular stringed instruments. But for some time to come, rival camps of lutenists and guitarists would lose no opportunity to badmouth each others' instrument and musicianship. In 1556 in France, for example, it was reported that while the pear-shaped lute had been a popular instrument, people were playing the guitar even more.