Chelys
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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The chelys was a stringed musical instrument, the common lyre of the ancient Greeks, which had a convex back of tortoiseshell or of wood shaped like the shell. The word chelys was used in allusion to the oldest lyre of the Greeks, which was said to have been invented by Hermes. According to the Homeric Hymn to Hermes (475) he was attracted by sounds of music while walking on the banks of the Nile, and found they proceeded from the shell of a tortoise across which were stretched tendons which the wind had set in vibration.
The word has been applied arbitrarily since classic times to various stringed instruments, some bowed and some twanged, probably owing to the back being much vaulted. Athanasius Kircher (Musurgia universalis, 486) applied the name of chelys to a kind of viol with eight strings. Numerous representations of the chelys lyre or testudo occur on Greek vases, in which the actual tortoiseshell is depicted; a good illustration is given in Le Antichità di Ercolano (vol. i. p1. 43). Propertius (iv. 6) calls the instrument the lyra testudinea. Joseph Justus Scaligerwas probably the first writer to draw attention to the difference between the chelys and the kithara.
