The Lyres, or Harps, of Ur are a set of four stringed instruments dug up at the Royal Cemetery of the very ancient Sumerian city-state of Ur, nowadays Iraq, in a joint expedition of the British Museum and the Penn Museum in 1929.

More precisely three lyres and a harp, they date as far back as the Early Dynastic III Period of Mesopotamia, roughly between 2550 and 2450 BC, which renders them about 4500 years and hence the oldest surviving stringed instruments worldwide.

The ‘Golden Lyre of Ur’ or ‘Bull’s Lyre,’ pictured above, is the finest of them all, housed in the Iraq Museum in Bahdad, while the other three are the ‘Queen’s Lyre,’ the ‘Bull-headed Lyre’ and the ‘Silver Lyre.’