A short history of the harp
The harp is one of the oldest instrument families still played today. Arched, bow-shaped harps appear in Egyptian and West and Central African depictions from as early as 3000–4000 BCE, played resting against the shoulder. A second ancient form, the angular harp — two crosspieces at right angles, strings stretched between them — arose separately in Assyria and also spread through Egypt and Greece.
The medieval frame harp
The frame harp — a triangular structure with a forepillar closing the frame around the strings, the shape this page's instrument borrows — appears in Europe by the 9th century and in Ireland by the 8th, though where exactly it originated is still debated: possibly brought north by migrating Celtic peoples, possibly developed independently. It became central to Celtic musical culture, strung with wire and tuned diatonically, seven notes to the octave. By the late 14th century a slimmer, straighter-pillared "Gothic harp" had displaced the earlier form on the European continent and was strung with gut by around 1500 — the design that eventually split into the Irish clairseach on one branch and the modern orchestral harp on the other.
The pedal harp
A diatonic harp can only play the notes it's tuned to. From the early 18th century, makers raced to fix that: hook mechanisms in the soundbox, worked by foot pedals, could sharpen a string's pitch on demand. Early hooks were fussy and prone to buzzing; over the century they were refined into paired levers called béquilles. The instrument in its modern form — the double-action pedal harp, with seven pedals each able to raise a string by a semitone or a tone — was perfected by Sébastien Érard in the early 19th century, and is essentially what you'd see in an orchestra today.
Modern harps: pedals, levers and electricity
Alongside the orchestral pedal harp, smaller lever harps (sometimes called folk or Celtic harps) use a hand-flipped lever at the top of each string instead of a pedal system — lighter, cheaper, and closer in spirit to the medieval instrument. Both kinds now also come in electric and electro-acoustic versions, with piezo pickups feeding an amplifier or effects chain, the harp's equivalent of the electric guitar's journey from its acoustic ancestor.
Harp traditions beyond Europe
The harp's story is not a single European line. In West Africa, the kora — a 21-string harp-lute with a calabash body, central to the Mandé jeliya tradition of griot praise-singing and oral history — has been documented since at least the 13th-century Mali Empire. Ethiopia and Eritrea's krar and beguena, and Uganda's ennanga, are part of a wider family of African harps and harp-lyres used for court praise, storytelling and devotion for centuries. In South America, Spanish colonists brought European harps to Paraguay and the Andes in the 16th century; Paraguayan luthiers made the instrument their own, and the arpa paraguaya is now the country's national instrument, carried worldwide by touring Paraguayan harpists since the mid-20th century.
How this harp is built
A harp has a soundbox (the resonating body the strings' vibration is amplified through), a neck (the curved beam the strings attach to at their upper end), a forepillar (the column bracing the neck against the string tension — without it the frame would fold under the pull of a full set of strings), and the strings themselves, running the length between neck and soundbox. Pedal harps add pedals in the base and mechanical linkages through the pillar; lever harps put a small lever at each string's top instead.
Harpists rarely count strings while playing — with anywhere from 22 to 47 of them, that's not practical mid-piece. Instead, by the 18th century it became standard to colour every C string red and every F string black or dark blue (the bright colours also read well under stage lighting), leaving every other string its natural pale colour. A glance at the nearest red or blue string tells a harpist exactly where they are. This page follows that same convention — look for it in the 3D harp and the key panel.