The rebab
The ancestor of nearly every European bowed string, displaced by the violin in its own homeland
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The rebab (Arabic ربابة) is the ancestor of nearly every European bowed string — ⭐⭐ and it was the violin that displaced it in its own homeland.
| Category | Attribution |
|---|---|
| HS class | Chordophone · bowed · spike fiddle · definite pitch |
| Subtype | 321.312 (spike box lute, bowed) · small round or coconut-shell body · front covered with sheepskin or parchment · long thin neck ending in a pegbox · no fingerboard · one to three strings (four on the Iraqi joza) · an iron spike standing on the floor |
| Family | World · bowed strings (Arab · Persian · Turkish · Iraqi · Syrian · Afghan · Pakistani · Indonesian · Thai · Xinjiang) |
| Key features | one to three strings (four on joza) · no fingerboard · front covered with sheepskin or parchment · an iron spike standing on the floor (spike fiddle) · a bow far more curved than a violin's · hair usually horsehair |
| Compass | barely more than an octave · it wins on a voice-like tone |
| Fate | displaced across the Arab world by the violin and the kemenche · in Turkey it survives only in the Mevlevi lodge under the name rebab · its old names were forgotten |
⭐⭐ The main line: the one the violin replaced
「the ancestor of almost all European bowed instruments」——the site's most ironic tale of birth and ending
The rebab is the ancestor of the medieval European rebec (11th–18th centuries) and of the Byzantine lira: its pear-shaped variant reached Western Europe in the 11th century and became the rebec, and that rebec line is one of the ancestors of the violin family. ⭐⭐ In other words, a stretch of the violin's blood is rebab blood.
⭐⭐ And then it was pushed out in its own homeland — across the Arab world the rebab was gradually displaced by the violin and by the kemenche. It became the great-great-great-grandparent of its own successors, and the first member of its own family to be swept out of the house.
⭐⭐ And the sharper layer of it is in Turkey: in the second half of the 18th century viola d'amore arrived from Europe and was taken up enthusiastically, and Turkey's own bowed instrument, the kemence, fell out of favour in secular music, ⭐⭐ surviving only in the Mevlevi lodge under the name rebab. ⭐⭐ The old names kemân and kemence were forgotten, and rebab became its only name — the lodge even attributed a kind of sacredness to the kemence.
| Period | Where it is and what it is called |
|---|---|
| Before the 8th century | Already recorded (so named no later than the 8th century) · origin traditionally assigned to Kurdistan in northern Iran |
| 10th century | The great music theorist al-Farabi mentions the instrument |
| 11th century | The pear-shaped variant reaches Western Europe and becomes the rebec (11th–18th centuries) |
| Medieval | The Byzantine lira and the rebec share this ancestry |
| Second half of the 18th century | viola d'amore arrives in Turkey and the kemence loses its place |
| After the 18th century | The Arab world is taken over by the violin and the kemenche |
| Today | One name left in the Mevlevi lodge — rebab |
⭐⭐ A rule worth carrying away: when an instrument is displaced, what usually survives is not its shape but the position it occupied — ⭐⭐ the rebab lost its place in secular music to the violin and kept its place in the lodge; the lodge wanted a bowed string, not a violin. ⭐⭐ It gave up everything in the Arab world except a position, and a borrowed name (against the site's "instrument as position" line: the ney holds the slot of blowing, the oud holds the slot of maqam, the rebab holds the slot of the one bowed string in the lodge).
⭐⭐ An iron spike on the floor
⭐ Form: a small round or coconut-shell body · the front covered with sheepskin or parchment · a long thin neck ending in a pegbox · one to three strings (the Iraqi joza has four) · no fingerboard · an iron spike on the bottom that stands on the floor.
⭐⭐ Which is why it is a spike fiddle: not held at the shoulder, not tucked under the chin, but standing on the floor like a cello — and that spike is the whole manual for its posture. ⭐⭐ A whole set of trade-offs grows out of it: the body stands, close to the ground and the legs, and the skin face radiates directly, so few overtones, a hard attack, right next to the body; ⭐⭐ and the price is no ease of moving quickly and no room for high positions — ⭐⭐ which is both the physical reason for its voice-like tone and the physical reason the violin pushed it out of secular music.
⭐ Bow: far more curved than a violin bow, and the hair is usually horsehair; ⚠️ whether the hair sits between the two strings or outside them differs from one school to another — so this page records only the certain fact, that it is bowed. ⭐⭐ The full account of the bowed family is at bow technique and character: the Chinese bowed instruments split into nine with the hair between the strings and four with it outside, ⭐⭐ and the rebab stands right on that watershed — the morin khuur's habit of rubbing with the hair outside the two strings is one concrete coordinate on that line.
| Item | Rebab (Arab, Iraqi joza) | Yehu (Hainan, China) | Oud (Arab world) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Body | small round or coconut shell | hollowed coconut shell | pear-shaped wooden bowl |
| Soundboard | sheepskin or parchment | thin paulownia board | spruce or cedar |
| Strings | one to three (four on joza) | two | eleven (five doubled courses plus a single bass) |
| Fingerboard | none | none | none |
| Support | an iron spike on the floor | a base plate | held across the lap |
| Excitation | bowed | bowed | plucked |
⭐⭐ Among this fretless, bowed family the rebab is the smallest: the oud sings maqam microtones off a fretless board, the yehu keeps its place as a quiet second part, ⭐⭐ and the rebab pushes the fretless idea to its limit — one string to three, with the pitch found by the finger stopping the string directly.
⭐⭐ A little over an octave: it wins on tone, not on pitch
⭐⭐ Reliable sources give its compass only as a qualitative description — a little over an octave — and record its virtue elsewhere: valued for its voice-like tone.
⭐⭐ This is the site's best bargain: it gives up compass to buy a throat that sits next to a human voice. ⭐⭐ Narrow is not a defect but a division of labour — with one to three strings and no fingerboard, the pitch is found by the finger stopping the string directly, and there are only so many places to stop it; ⭐⭐ rather than make the body bigger and the compass wider, it made its timbre look like a voice.
| Instrument | Compass | Strings | What it stands on |
|---|---|---|---|
| Rebab | barely more than an octave | one to three (four on joza) | a voice-like tone |
| Yehu | two octaves (g–d¹) | two | a second part, "very quiet and peaceful" |
| Erhu | three octaves (D4–A6) | two | hugging the singing line |
| Violin | four octaves (G3–E7) | four | the soloist |
| Harp | six and a half octaves | 47 | the compass itself is the argument |
⭐⭐ Two things come out of this table: first, from the rebab to the violin, the compass buys the right to stand alone; second, ⭐⭐ the rebab is the only bowed instrument here that does not stand on its compass at all — it is closer to a reed beaten by a bow, a skin that talks.
⭐⭐ A map of names: everywhere it has another name
⭐⭐ The list of rebab aliases is longer than its list of features: the Arabic ربابة · joza / jawza in Iraq and Syria · rebab in Turkey · rabab in Egypt and the Mediterranean · ghichak / kabuli rabab in Afghanistan and Pakistan · kamanche / kamancha in Persia, meaning the small bow · kamanga in Kuwait and Egypt · the gamelan rebab in Indonesia · saw sam sai in Thailand.
⭐⭐ The name kamanche is itself a translation accident: the Persian kamancha means the small bow, and the Turkish kemânçe inherited the word — ⭐⭐ and the kemence was the only bowed instrument in Turkish music before the 18th century, its old body hollowed from a coconut and its face covered with sheatfish skin or ox pericardium, in two-string and three-string variants alike. ⭐⭐ A people named their only bowed instrument the small bow, and another people then took its name away from it — in the end even the name was borrowed.
| Region | Name | Form and use |
|---|---|---|
| Arab world (general) | rebab / rabāba / rebeb / rababa / rabeba | the original name · skin soundbox · one to three strings |
| Iraq · Syria | joza / jawza | coconut-shell body · usually four strings |
| Turkey | rebab (once kemânçe) | old coconut body · sheatfish skin or ox pericardium · now kept in the Mevlevi lodge |
| Persia | kamanche / kamancha | Persian for the small bow · large · compass close to a viola's |
| Egypt · Mediterranean | rabab | the general Arabic name |
| Afghanistan · Pakistan | ghichak / kabuli rabab | a Central Asian branch |
| Kuwait · Egypt | kamanga | a branch of the Arab world |
| Indonesia (Java) | rebab (gamelan) | two strings · coconut shell with skin · one pelog, one slendro |
| Thailand | saw sam sai | a bowed instrument |
⭐⭐ Names never come from the form — joza names the shell, kamanche names the bow, rebab says nothing at all; ⭐⭐ and the only one that states its origin is ghichak, a local name in the Afghan region. The name history of an instrument is usually the history of who took it over.
⭐⭐ The two fiddles of Java: one pelog, one slendro
⭐⭐ The rebab of the Indonesian gamelan is the strangest branch of all: only two strings · the body is a coconut shell covered with skin · the bow hair is horsehair, and ⭐⭐ the bow is never kept taut — the tension of the string is controlled by the bow player's own hand. ⭐⭐ This is not a flaw but a design: every stroke of the bow very slightly tunes the string, so the same note can carry different slight differences under different hands.
⭐⭐ The gamelan keeps two rebabs — one pelog, one slendro — ⭐⭐ and the two never play together. ⭐⭐ One instrument, one set of pitches split into two, ⭐⭐ and two that never meet is the strangest scoring on the site (against the site's "one instrument, two jobs": the erhu covers two parts with one · the gamelan rebab is one instrument holding two slots).
⭐⭐ The rebab also grew a second life in Indonesia as an instrument in singers' hands — after the singer and rebab player K.P.H. Notoprojo, that road, where the fiddle speaks in place of the voice, kept running through South-East Asia.
⭐⭐ A rule to take away: what survives is the position, not the shape
⭐⭐ Back to the most ironic thread: it is the ancestor of nearly every European bowed string, and it was the violin that put it out in its own home. ⭐⭐ A descendant turning its ancestor out of the door is extraordinarily rare in the history of instruments — and the rebab is one of the cases.
⭐⭐ Three judgements worth carrying away:
⭐⭐ One · after being displaced, what survives is the position. The rebab gave way to the violin in secular music and kept its place in the Mevlevi lodge — the lodge wanted a bowed string, not a violin. ⭐⭐ It lost everything it had in the Arab world except a place to stand.
⭐⭐ Two · when the position changes, the name has to change. The old names kemân and kemence were forgotten and rebab became its only name. ⭐⭐ That is not a renaming; it is the fact that from then on the thing was called that name in that one setting only — its name shrank to the single use that was left to it. ⭐⭐ When an instrument survives in a single setting, its name contracts into that setting too.
⭐⭐ Three · form is the easiest thing to sacrifice and the least worth defending. ⭐⭐ Not one of its spike, coconut shell or sheepskin was preserved as form when the violin displaced it — ⭐⭐ in the end the rebab lived on as a borrowed name plus a fixed occasion. ⭐⭐ So what it left behind was not a shape but a rule: after an instrument is displaced, what saves it is the position it holds, and whether it is willing to change its name for that position.
Lineage and destinations
| Node | Content |
|---|---|
| Before the 8th century | Already recorded (so named no later than the 8th century) · origin traditionally assigned to Kurdistan in northern Iran |
| 10th century | The great music theorist al-Farabi mentions the instrument |
| 11th century | The pear-shaped variant reaches Western Europe and becomes the rebec (11th–18th centuries) · the Byzantine lira shares this ancestry |
| The age of Islamic trade routes | Spreads to North Africa, the Middle East, parts of Europe and the Far East |
| First half of the 18th century | The Turkish kemence is the only bowed instrument in local music (old coconut body · sheatfish skin or ox pericardium) |
| Second half of the 18th century | viola d'amore arrives in Turkey and is taken up eagerly · the kemence falls out of favour in secular music |
| After the 18th century | The whole Arab world is taken over by the violin and the kemenche |
| Today | One name left in the Mevlevi lodge, rebab · in the Indonesian gamelan one pelog and one slendro that never play together · saw sam sai in Thailand · related forms in Xinjiang |
The rebab is a bowed chordophone, a spike fiddle. Reliable sources give its compass only as a qualitative description, a little over an octave, while its virtue is recorded elsewhere, a voice-like tone; the figure therefore takes D3–E4 as a schematic of barely more than an octave, not a measured value, with the middle G3–C4 as the usual working register. ⭐⭐ The narrow compass has a cause: one to three strings, no fingerboard, so the pitch is found by the finger stopping the string directly, and there are only so many places to stop it. What it gives up in compass it buys back as a voice-like throat. ⭐⭐ By contrast the large Persian kamanche of the same family has a compass close to a viola's, while the Indonesian gamelan rebab is tuned to two separate scales, one pelog and one slendro, and is played with a bow that is never kept taut, its tension controlled by the player's hand. Written equals sounding.
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Sources
- ⭐⭐ 拉巴卜史（Wikipedia Rebab + Britannica Rebab + 世界乐器数据库 worldinstruments 条目 + 维基 Mevlevî 音乐与土耳其 kemence 条目 + 印尼 gamelan rebab 文献 + K.P.H. Notoprojo 演奏家资料）——⭐⭐ 主线：它是被小提琴取代的那一把——「the ancestor of almost all European bowed instruments」（几乎所有欧洲弓弦乐器的祖先）——⭐⭐ 全站最反讽的一次「身世与结局」：它自己被小提琴淘汰——在整个阿拉伯世界被小提琴与 kemenche 逐渐取代——⭐⭐ 更狠的一层在土耳其：18 世纪后半叶 viola d'amore 从欧洲传入并被热衷采用后，kemençe 在世俗音乐中失宠，只在 Mevlevî（旋转派）道场中以 rebab 之名存续——⭐⭐ 原来的名字 kemân / kemânçe 被忘掉了，rebab 反而成了它唯一的名字；道场里甚至把一种神圣性归给 kemançe——⭐⭐ 形制：小圆琴身或椰壳琴身 · 正面蒙羊皮或羊皮纸（parchment or sheepskin）· 长而细的琴颈，末端有弦轴箱 · 1–3 根弦（伊拉克 joza 有 4 弦）· 没有指板（no fingerboard）· 底部一根铁刺（spike）撑在地上 → 归入尖杆琴（spike fiddle）· 演奏时竖直持，搁在膝上或立于地面——⭐⭐ 音域：「little over an octave」（一个八度多一点），价值在于「像人声的音色」（valued for its voice-like tone），但音域极有限——⭐⭐ 弓：比小提琴弓弯得多，弓毛通常用马尾；弓夹在两弦之间还是弦外，各家做法不同——⭐⭐ 历史：8 世纪已有记载（so named no later than the 8th century）· 10 世纪 al-Farabi 提到过这种琴· 经伊斯兰贸易路线传遍北非、中东、欧洲部分地区与远东· ancient rabab 是中世纪欧洲 rebec（11–18 世纪）与拜占庭 lira 的祖先· 梨形变体在 11 世纪传到西欧并变成 rebec· 传统上把它的起源归于北伊朗的库尔德斯坦地区——⭐⭐ 分布：伊朗 kamanche（波斯语「小弓」· 大型 · 音域接近维奥尔琴）· 伊拉克与叙利亚 joza（椰壳琴身 · 四弦）· 土耳其 rebab · 埃及与地中海 rabab · 阿富汗与巴基斯坦 ghichak / kabuli rabab · 中亚 · 印度尼西亚 gamelan 里的 rebab（两弦 · 椰壳蒙皮 · 弓毛用马尾且弓不绷紧 · 张力靠弓手控制 · gamelan 里两把，一把 pelog 一把 slendro，绝不同奏）· 泰国 saw sam sai· 中国新疆的相关形制——⭐⭐ 音乐家：哈桑·埃格扎尔（Hassaan Egzaar · 伊朗歌手兼拉巴卜演奏家）· K.P.H. Notoprojo（印尼）
- ⭐⭐ 对照线 ——violin（小提琴）：⭐⭐ 取代它的那一把——同属弓弦，却把音域从「一个八度多一点」放大到四个八度，也把「贴着脸唱」换成「站在台上独奏」；cello（大提琴）：⭐⭐ 姿态的同族——底部那根撑地的铁刺，大提琴换成了一根尾针；erhu（二胡）：⭐⭐ 中国拉弦族的无品弓擦——同样是手指直接按弦定音，差别在弓毛夹不夹在两弦之间；yehu（椰胡）：⭐⭐ 形制最接近的一件——椰壳挖成琴身 · 蒙桐木薄板 · 两弦 · 底托，与伊拉克 joza 的椰壳琴身同属一条「就地取材」的路；oud（乌德琴）：⭐⭐ 同一片音乐里的另一种弓弦——同一个马卡姆世界，一个用拨片、一个用弓；ney（奈伊笛）：⭐⭐ 伊斯兰世界里的同场者——道场里的声音不止一把琴；tanbur（弹布尔）：⭐⭐ 波斯与中亚的长颈拨弦邻居——⭐⭐ 拉弦段的总账在 拉弦乐器弓法与韵味，马头琴（matouqin）那一支的「弓毛在两弦外面擦奏」，正是拉巴卜「各家做法不同」的一个具体坐标
- ⭐ 制作注记 —— 条目写作日期 2026-10-21；inst 站世界乐器子类条目；SVG ×2 中英各一；range 两版逐字相同；实例取 chinafolk C3 参照
Used for fact-checking only; all prose is original.