{
    "@context": "https://schema.org",
    "@type": "NewsArticle",
    "@id": "https://badiyaa.com/metropolitan-museum-skull-lyre-central-africa/#article",
    "mainEntityOfPage": "https://badiyaa.com/metropolitan-museum-skull-lyre-central-africa/",
    "headline": "Metropolitan Museum lyre from 19th-century Central Africa is built from a human skull and antelope horn",
    "description": "The Metropolitan Museum of Art holds a 19th-century Central African lyre made from a human skull, wood, antelope horn, skin, gut and hair.",
    "datePublished": "2026-11-14T10:40:00+00:00",
    "dateModified": "2026-11-14T10:40:00+00:00",
    "author": {
        "@type": "Organization",
        "name": "Badiyaa Editorial Desk",
        "url": "https://badiyaa.com/author/editorial-desk/"
    },
    "publisher": {
        "@type": "NewsMediaOrganization",
        "@id": "https://badiyaa.com/#organization",
        "name": "Badiyaa",
        "url": "https://badiyaa.com/",
        "logo": {
            "@type": "ImageObject",
            "url": "https://badiyaa.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/10/badiyaa-logo-color-600x60-1.png",
            "width": 600,
            "height": 60
        },
        "email": "badiyaavideo@gmail.com",
        "publishingPrinciples": "https://badiyaa.com/editorial-policy/",
        "correctionsPolicy": "https://badiyaa.com/corrections/",
        "actionableFeedbackPolicy": "https://badiyaa.com/contact/",
        "ownershipFundingInfo": "https://badiyaa.com/about/#ownership",
        "sameAs": [
            "https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=61595518283625",
            "https://www.instagram.com/badiyaa.com.ai/",
            "https://www.threads.net/@badiyaa.com.ai"
        ],
        "parentOrganization": {
            "@type": "Organization",
            "name": "Rezilient Digital",
            "url": "https://www.rezilientdigital.com/",
            "address": {
                "@type": "PostalAddress",
                "streetAddress": "Fl No 3, Nav Shyam Sadan, Plot No 38, Pestom Sagar, Chembur",
                "addressLocality": "Mumbai",
                "addressRegion": "Maharashtra",
                "postalCode": "400089",
                "addressCountry": "IN"
            },
            "sameAs": [
                "https://www.linkedin.com/company/rezilientdigital"
            ]
        }
    },
    "isAccessibleForFree": true,
    "inLanguage": "en-US",
    "wordCount": 659,
    "image": [
        "https://badiyaa.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/11/metropolitan-museum-of-art-entrance-nyc.webp",
        "https://badiyaa.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/11/metropolitan-museum-of-art-entrance-nyc-1024x858.webp"
    ],
    "articleSection": "Offbeat",
    "keywords": "Crosby Brown Collection, lyre, Mary Elizabeth Adams Brown, Metropolitan Museum of Art",
    "articleBody": "Catalog number 89.4.1268 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York is a plucked lyre, and the first material on its record is a human skull. The museum lists the rest plainly: wood, antelope horn, skin, gut and hair. The record dates it to the 19th century and describes its culture as Central African. The instrument is small. The Met gives its overall size as 13 centimeters high, 36.5 centimeters wide and 14 centimeters deep, or roughly 5 by 14 by 5.5 inches, which makes it wider than a sheet of letter paper is tall but far lighter in scale than a guitar. What the museum record actually says The online collection entry is short, and that is part of the story. It names no maker, no village and no country. The date range is a full century, from 1801 to 1900. The Met files the object in its Department of Musical Instruments under the classification “Chordophone-Lyre-plucked,” which places it in the family of instruments whose sound comes from vibrating strings that a player plucks. The credit line ties the lyre to one of the most important gifts the museum ever received: “The Crosby Brown Collection of Musical Instruments, 1889.” The record carries no photograph in the museum’s open-access data, and it is not marked as public domain. How a lyre is put together A lyre is a simple machine. Musicologists describe it as a yoke lute: a hollow resonating body with two arms rising from it, joined at the top by a crossbar, with the strings running from that yoke down across the body. In ancient Greece the resonator was traditionally a tortoise shell and the strings were gut. Read against that template, the Met’s materials list sketches a familiar design built from unfamiliar parts. A skull is a hollow, rigid shell, the job a sound box does; horn and wood can serve as arms and crossbar; skin can be stretched as a soundboard; gut is a classic string material. The museum’s entry does not assign each material to a part, so that reading is ours, not the Met’s. Lyres themselves are ancient. The earliest known examples come from Mesopotamian sites dated to about 2700 BC, and the family still lives on across East Africa today, from the krar and begena of Ethiopia and Eritrea to the nyatiti and obokano of Kenya and the endongo of Uganda. Somalia’s shareero is another living relative. The collector behind the gift The lyre reached New York through Mary Elizabeth Adams Brown (1842–1918), a writer and collector who named her instrument collection after her husband, John Crosby Brown. Her first donation to the Met, in 1889, was 270 instruments, mostly from the Far East, the Middle East, Africa and the Pacific Islands. She attached a condition that she and her son could keep adding pieces and swap items for better examples. They did. By her death the collection filled five gallery rooms and held about 3,600 objects; by the time her son died it had reached about 4,000. Her son also drew the 270 pen-and-ink illustrations for the catalog the family published before the gift. Here is the Badiyaa timeline in short: lyres appear in Mesopotamia around 2700 BC, this skull lyre is made sometime between 1801 and 1900, and it enters the Met in 1889 as part of a 270-piece founding gift. That date matters. An object that arrived in 1889 had to be made no later than that year, which narrows the Met’s century-wide window to its first 89 years at most. Badiyaa has looked at other instruments with surprising construction, including how the theremin is played in midair without being touched. More odd objects and records live on our Offbeat section page. Anyone who wants to look up the lyre can search the Met’s online collection for accession number 89.4.1268, the number the gift has carried since it arrived 137 years ago. Further reading Wikipedia: Lyre Wikipedia: Mary Elizabeth Adams Brown Image: Arad, CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons This article was produced with AI assistance and reviewed by our Editorial Desk. How we work.",
    "markdown": "https://badiyaa.com/metropolitan-museum-skull-lyre-central-africa.md"
}