[11] Anacreon, poet of drinking and love (and infatuation, disappointment, revelry, parties, festivals, and observations of everyday people), sang of playing the Lydian harp and pektis in his works.

In the Aegean Sea area, in the 3rd millennium BC, the Cycladic culture left behind marble figurines depicting men with harps.

Their position is just the opposite of that which is common with today's western harps; the thin bar-shaped neck rests horizontally on the left thigh of the seated musician, while the body of the instrument connected to it is curved along the musician's upper body, stretching and widening and bending back towards the end.

Another type is very similar to the previous one, but a significant difference is that it is a frame harp, so a column connects the ends of the neck and body.

onwards, a musical instrument identified as a harp, called paktis or pektis (πηκτίς),[25] appears in the works of Sappho, Alkaios, Anacreon and Pindar.

[26] Classical Greek writers described it as a hand-plucked, multi-stringed instrument of Lydian origin, characterized by playing in some kind of octave parallelism.

[27] Attic writers mention a trigon or trigonos (τρίγωνος = 'triangular'),[28] which is considered to be different from the pektis, but similar in that it is "many-stringed;"[29] in some places it is also called trigonon psalterion.

[35] Ancient Greek music is basically vocal: the melodies, including the instruments, were mostly limited to the scope of the human voice.

[36] The sambuke (σαμβύκη (sambýke); Latin sambuca)[37] is often related to the trigonon and magadis in written sources, but its distinguishing features are not clearly revealed.

[41][42] Sachs decided that the only type of instrument that corresponded to the description of the siege engine as being a boat with an upright ladder was the sambuke.

[3] "It has the narrow, boat-shaped body in a horizontal position, and an upright stringholder upon it, the lateral knobs of which give it a ladderlike appearance.

[3] Sachs also thought the instrument Mesopotamian or Iranian, corresponding to the sabka angular harp in the orchestra of Nebuchadnezzar II.

[45] According to one hypothesis, the epigonion (and perhaps the simikion also) may have originally belonged to the board-zither family, that is, it consisted of a flat instrument body and strings stretched parallel to its plane from one side to the other.

The statement that it was later used in a vertical position suggests that it was initially played horizontally, perhaps while held on the player's knees.

[46] It is conceivable that these instruments were originally not made for the purpose of musical performances, but for the study of vocal ranges and pitches.

Among the Old Testament writings, the book of the prophet Daniel contains four passages where musical instruments were shown in the court of Nebuchadnezzar, who reigned at the beginning of the 6th century BC.

[48] The sabbecha (שַׂבְּכָא or סַבְּכָא) can be related to the sambuke, but the name of the Greek instrument itself is foreign, of Middle Eastern, perhaps Phoenician origin.

The early Christian writer Saint Isidore of Seville, for example, classified it among wind instruments,[49] Papias also imagined it as a "people's zither".

[52] The Persian santur and its variants, santir and santari, came from the same Greek word, perhaps through the mediation of the Aramaic psanterin, the name of a trapezoidal zither played with beaters, which is a relative of the cimbalom.

[56] Greek authors from the 4th century BC criticized the "multi-stringed" nature of certain instruments, the ability to play them in several harmonies, i.e. in different tones, and to switch from one to another.

In his work Republic, Plato lists two types of psaltery, the trigonos and the péktis, among the undesirable "many-stringed" instruments.

Aristotle, in his Politics, does not recommend certain kind of harps, like péktis, heptagonos, trigonos and sambaukes for the purpose of learning music; according to him, they are only pleasing, but not useful for virtue.