The psaltery is a flat soundboard with strings stretched across it, plucked with the fingers or a plectrum. Medieval images show several shapes: a trapezoid, a pig’s snout, a triangle. The name travels. It sits in a family of zithers that also includes instruments of the Mediterranean and the Near East, among them the qanun, without every family member being the same object under a different word.
It earns a place beside the chelys because both are plucked and both get recruited by sacred song, and because the difference between them is the point of a catalogue. The lyre is a yoke and two arms. The psaltery is a board. One is carried against the body like a small harp. The other often sits on the lap. Confusing them makes the pictures in manuscripts harder to read, not easier.
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Recording
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