Who Invented The Bow Of A Violin?
Origin The question of when & where the bow was invented is of interest because the bow made possible several of the most important instruments in music today. Authorities give different answers to this question, & this article will give only the predominant opinion. Scholars are agreed that stringed instruments as a category existed long before the bow. There was a long period—possibly thousands of years—in which all stringed instruments were plucked. In fact, it is likely that bowed instruments are not much more than a thousand years old. Eric Halfpenny, writing in the 1988 Encyclopaedia Britannica, says “bowing can be traced as far back as the Islamic civilization of the 10th century … it seems likely that the principle of bowing originated among the nomadic horse riding cultures of Central Asia, whence it spread quickly through Islam & the East, so that by 1000 it had almost simultaneously reached China, Java, North Africa, the Near East & Balkans, & Europe.” Halfpenny notes that i
