structural:scholar_edition, linguistic:voice_change
Central and Northern European lyres

Other instruments known as lyres have been fashioned and used in Europe outside the Greco-Roman world since at least the Iron Age. Lyres are depicted on ceramic and bronze vessels of the Proto-Celtic Hallstatt culture across central Europe. Among them there are lyres with rounded bottoms, stringed instruments whose resonators seem to be missing and lyres with strongly curved yokes and single or double bulging resonators. The number of strings depicted varies from two to ten. Fragmented tuning pegs and bridges made of wood have been discovered from the Iron Age industrial settlement in the Ramsau valley at Dürrnberg, Austria. Possible further wooden tuning pegs have been found in Glastonbury in Somerset in England and Biskupin in Poland. The remains of what is thought to be the bridge of a 2300-year-old lyre were discovered on the Isle of Skye, Scotland in 2010.

In 1988, a stone bust from the 2nd or 1st century BC was discovered in Brittany, France which depicts a figure wearing a torc playing a seven-string lyre.

The Germanic lyre is representative of a separate strand of lyre development. Appearing in warrior graves of the first millennium AD, these lyres differ from the lyres of the Mediterranean antiquity, by a long, shallow and broadly rectangular shape, with a hollow soundbox curving at the base, and two hollow arms connected across the top by an integrated crossbar or ‘yoke. Famous examples include the lyre from the ship burial at Sutton Hoo, and the decayed lyre discovered in silhouette at the Prittlewell royal Anglo-Saxon burial in Essex. The waterlogged lyre recovered from a grave at Trossingen, Germany, in 2001 is the best-preserved example found so far.