One of the earliest musical instruments in history is the harp. The hunting bow served as the basis for the earliest harps. The hunter's bow-like instrument depicted in the wall murals of ancient Egyptian tombs from as early as 3000 B.C. lacks the pillar that is present in current harps. Around 1500 B.C., the angled harp arrived in Egypt from Asia. It was constructed using an angled connection between a straight string arm and a hollow sound box. The strings were linked to the string-arm at one end and connected to the sound-box at the other. The strings may have been made of hair or plant fiber. By turning the knots holding the strings in place, the strings were tuned.
Harpists had to recalibrate those strings they needed for each piece since early harps lacked mechanical systems to provide the player access to multiple keys. A row of metal hooks was eventually added to the left side of the harp in the later half of the seventeenth century. The pitch of each string was lowered by a half step when the player physically turned a hook against it. Contemporary non-pedal harps are constructed with extremely sophisticated sharpening levers attached for each string, which when activated, produce a very good tone quality. With the left hand, levers are typically operated, and expert players can make changes very quickly.
The harp needed to change with the times in order to keep its popularity as music changed. The harp's ability to play in all keys had become crucial rather than being constrained to only eight major keys and five minor notes. Sebastian Erard received a patent for the Double Action pedal harp in 1810 as a result of this need.
THE LEVER HARP, 1660
Instrument manufacturers from Tyrolien, Germany, had the idea that it would be possible to manually adjust the tension of some strings around 1660. Each string's individual tone was altered by this system. The foundation of Celtic harps even though we know them today is that.