Hello! And welcome to my blog. I am going to be going through the process of building and playing an ancient Greek lyre, a barbitos (described in more detail on my about page). I aim to build something that looks like this :
This is my current design plan. I just do not know how to make it. Other goals for this project are accessibility, and sustainability. I have purchased a wooden bowl and a wooden chair from local thrift stores.
Wooden bowl/ hopefully a lyre base 
Wooden chair/ lyre arms 
Strings purchased for lyre
I purchased the chair for $12 and the bowl for $2. There have been re-creations of barbitoi (plural of barbitos) out of wooden bowls before, so I thought this would work well. For the skin of the drum, I went on amazon and purchased an 18-inch goat skin from Hawkdancing studio for 18.99 (minus shipping). For strings, I purchased guitar folk strings, with nylon strings included in a pack; I purchased two packs to achieve 7 nylon strings for $21. All told, everything came to around $61.29. For my next couple of lyres I hope to get the pricing down.
I am going to take apart the chair, to use the legs for lyre arms, and sand the bowl in order to thin it out, and make it more like a tortoise shell.
I am planning on building three prototypes out of cheap and available materials, to practice my lyre building. I will build my fourth lyre out of materials more similarly to those used in ancient times. For my first prototype, I just want it to make sound.
I am going to be creating a modern process for doing this, as much as I am imitating an ancient one. Full authenticity is not feasible. I hope by the end of this to have a functioning lyre, based on the idea of one in ancient Greece. I then will pair it with my vocal performance of Sappho, in both ancient greek and english. I am not going to fully achieve Sappho’s talent or music. I truly am just ‘playing’ her, because I believe the beauty she created worth emulating. With all this in mind, my next task is to start preparing my materials.