Lyres appear in Mesopotamia by about 2700 BCE
Organologists classify the lyre as a yoke lute: its strings run to a crossbar held between two arms, level with the soundboard. Cultures ringing the Mediterranean played lyres for millennia, and the oldest known examples come from Mesopotamian sites dated to about 2700 BCE.
Eastern lyres with flat bases turn up in Egypt, Syria, Anatolia, and the Levant. Round-based western lyres arose in Syria and Anatolia, faded in the east by about 1750 BCE, then reappeared in Greece around 1700–1400 BCE and spread with Rome. Mycenaean Linear B already records lyrists as ru-ra-ta-e.
Classical Greek usage could mean a smaller amateur lyre versus the professional cithara. Organologists split bowl (321.21) and box (321.22) types. Forms proliferated from 2700 to 700 BCE along those eastern and western geographic tracks. Thick lyres, with deeper sound boxes, are known from Egypt between 2000 and 100 BCE and from Anatolia around 1600 BCE. English took the word from Greek by way of Latin.
Scholars sort the eastern lyres into bull, thick, thin and giant types. The bull lyres of Ur, with a bull's head on one side, date to about 2500 BCE and rank as the world's oldest surviving stringed instruments, although earlier pictures of such lyres come from elsewhere in Mesopotamia and from Susa in Elam. The round western lyre later gave rise to the Germanic lyre, or rotte, played across north-western Europe from pre-Christian times into the Middle Ages. By the Hellenistic era, around 330 BCE, trade had blurred the old divide, carrying flat-based and round-based lyres in both directions. Modern Egyptians call the Nubian lyre qytarah barbarîyeh, and in Somalia the shareero lyre is still played.
Source: Lyre
