The santur is a hammered dulcimer of Mesopotamian origin. It is a trapezoid box zither with a walnut body and ninety-two steel (or bronze) strings. The strings, tuned to the same pitch in groups of four, are struck with two wooden mallets. The tuning of these twenty-three sets of strings extends from the lower yakah (G) up to jawab jawab husayni (a). The bridges are called dama (chessmen) because they look like pawns. The name 'santur' is thought to be derived from the Greek psalterion which, itself, is the result of musical experiments by Phythagorus based on the 6,000-year-old bull-headed lyre discovered from excavations found in the ancient city of Ur

Ur

Ur was an important city-state in ancient Sumer located at the site of modern Tell el-Muqayyar in Iraq's Dhi Qar Governorate...

 ('Children's Book of Music' ISBN 978-0-7566-6734-4). It is also thought that the name is derived from "Sant"- "Ur", meaning sound of Ur in Sumerian. It is native to Iran and Turkey as well as Iraq. The instrument was brought to Europe by the Arabs through North Africa and Spain during the Middle Ages and also to China where it was referred to as the "foreign qin". It is the main instrument used in the classical Maqam al-iraqi

Maqam al-iraqi

Al-Maqam Al-Iraqi is a four hundred year old genre of Arab music found in Iraq and often considered the most perfect form of maqam. The instrumentation of the ensemble used in maqam al-iraqi, Jalghi baghdadi, includes a qari' , Iraqi Santur , jawza , tabla or dunbak , and sometimes riqq...

 tradition. ('Music of the Arabs' ISBN 0931340888)

The Iraqi santur has, since its inception, been fully chromatic allowing for full maqam modulations. It uses 12 bridges of steel strings on both sides, and has three movable bridges: B half flat qaraar, E half flat and B half flat jawaab. The non-standard version of the Iraqi santur includes extra bridges so that there's no need to move those three bridges. However, playing it is a bit harder than playing the standard 12-bridge santur. ('Music of the Arabs' ISBN 0931340888)

History

The santur was invented in Mesopotamia in ancient Babylonian (1600-911 BCE) and neo-Assyrian (911-612 BCE) eras. This instrument was traded and traveled to different parts of the middle east and each country customized and designed their own versions to adapt to their musical scales and tunings. The original santur was made with tree bark, stones and stringed with goat intestines. The Mesopotamian santur is also the father of the harp, the Chinese yangqin, the harpsichord, the qanun, the cimbalom and the American and European hammered dulcimers. ('Music of the Arabs' ISBN 0931340888)

Notable Iraqi santur players

• Abdallah Ali (1929–1998)
• Akram Al Iraqi
• Amir ElSaffar
• Azhar Kubba
• Bahir Hashim al-Rajab al-Ubaydi (1951-)
• Basil al-Jarrah
• Ghazi Mahsub al-Azzawi
• Hugi Salih Rahmain Pataw (1848–1933)
• Hashim Al Rajab
• Hala Bassam
• Hammudi Ali al-Wardi
• Haj Hashim Muhammad Rajab al-Ubaydi (1921–2003)
• Hendrin Hikmat (1974-)
• Heskel Shmuli Ezra (1804–1894)
• Mohamed Abbas
• Muhammad Salih al-Santurchi (18th century)
• Muhammad Zaki Darwish al-Samarra'i (1955-)
• Mustafa Abd al-Qadir Tawfiq
• Qasim Muhammad Abd (1969-)
• Rahmatallah Safa'i
• Sa'ad Abd al-Latif al-Ubaydi
• Sabah Hashim
• Saif Walid al-Ubaydi
• Salman Enwiya
• Salman Sha'ul Dawud Bassun (1900–1950)
• Sha'ul Dawud Bassun (19th century)
• Shummel Salih Shmuli (1837–1915)
• Wesam al-Azzawy (1960-)
• Yusuf Badros Aslan (1844–1929)
• Yusuf Hugi Pataw (1886–1976)

Source

• Al-Hanafi, Jalal (1964). Al-Mughannūn al-Baghdādīyyūn wa al-Maqām al-ʻIrāqī. Baghdad: Wizarat al-Irshad.
• Touma, Habib Hassan (1996). The Music of the Arabs, trans. Laurie Schwartz. Portland, Oregon: Amadeus Press. ISBN 0931340888.

Further reading

• Duchesne-Guillemin, Marcelle (1980). "Sur la restitution de la musique hourrite". Revue de Musicologie 66, no. 1 (1980): 5–26.
• Duchesne-Guillemin, Marcelle (1984). A Hurrian Musical Score from Ugarit: The Discovery of Mesopotamian Music, Sources from the Ancient Near East, vol. 2, fasc. 2. Malibu, CA: Undena Publications. ISBN 0-89003-158-4
• Fink, Robert (1981). The Origin of Music: A Theory of the Universal Development of Music. Saskatoon: Greenwich-Meridian.
• Gütterbock, Hans (1970). "Musical Notation in Ugarit". Revue d'assyriologie et d'archéologie orientale 64, no. 1 (1970): 45–52.
• Kilmer, Anne Draffkorn (1971). The Discovery of an Ancient Mesopotamian Theory of Music. Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 115:131–49.
• Kilmer, Anne Draffkorn (1974). "The Cult Song with Music from Ancient Ugarit: Another Interpretation". Revue d'Assyriologie 68:69–82.
• Kilmer, Anne Draffkorn (1997). "Musik, A: philologisch". Reallexikon der Assyriologie und vorderasiatischen Archäologie 8, edited by Dietz Otto Edzard, 463–82. Berlin: De Gruyter. ISBN 3110148099.
• Kilmer, Anne (2001). "Mesopotamia §8(ii)". The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, second edition, edited by Stanley Sadie
  Stanley Sadie
  Stanley Sadie CBE was a leading British musicologist, music critic, and editor. He was editor of the sixth edition of the Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians , which was published as the first edition of the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians.Sadie was educated at St Paul's School,...
  
   and John Tyrrell
  John Tyrrell (professor of music)
  John Tyrrell was born in Salisbury, Southern Rhodesia in 1942. He studied at the universities of Cape Town, Oxford and Brno. In 2000 he was appointed Research Professor at Cardiff University....
  
  . London: Macmillan Publishers.
• Kilmer, Anne Draffkorn, Richard L. Crocker, and Robert R. Brown (1976). Sounds from Silence: Recent Discoveries in Ancient Near Eastern Music. Berkeley: Bit Enki Publications, 1976. Includes LP record, Bit Enki Records BTNK 101, reissued [s.d.] as CD.
• Vitale, Raoul (1982). "La Musique suméro-accadienne: gamme et notation musicale". Ugarit-Forschungen 14 (1982): 241–63.
• Wellesz, Egon, ed. (1957). New Oxford History of Music Volume I: Ancient and Oriental Music. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• West, M[artin]. L[itchfiel]. (1994). "The Babylonian Musical Notation and the Hurrian Melodic Texts". Music and Letters 75, no. 2 (May): 161–79.
• Wulstan, David (1968). "The Tuning of the Babylonian Harp". Iraq 30:215–28.
• Wulstan, David (1971). "The Earliest Musical Notation". Music and Letters 52 (1971): 365–82.