Mauritania, a country in North-West Africa, is bordered by the Atlantic Ocean on the west, by Senegal on the southwest, by Mali on the east and southeast, by Algeria on the northeast, and by the Morocco controlled Western Sahara on the northwest. It is named after the ancient Berber kingdom of Mauretania (present-day Morocco). The capital and largest city is Nouakchott, located on the Atlantic coast.
From the fifth to seventh centuries, the migration of Berber tribes from North Africa displaced the Bafours, the original inhabitants of present-day Mauritania and the ancestors of the Soninke. The Bafours were primarily agriculturalist, and among the first Saharan people to abandon their historically nomadic lifestyle. With the gradual desiccation of the Sahara, they headed south.
Mauritania - Tukolar - Guitar Solo
The guitar is a musical instrument with ancient roots that is used in a wide variety of musical styles. It typically has six strings -- but four, seven, eight, ten, and twelve string guitars also exist.
Traditionally guitars have usually been constructed of combinations of various woods and strung with animal gut, or more recently, with either nylon or steel strings.
The guitar may be defined as being an instrument having "a long, fretted neck, flat wooden soundboard, ribs, and a flat back, most often with incurved sides."
Instruments similar to the guitar have been popular for at least 5,000 years. The guitar appears to be derived from earlier instruments known in ancient India and Central Asia as the Sitar. The oldest known iconographic representation of an instrument displaying all the essential features of a guitar being played is a 3300 year old stone carving of a Hittite bard.
The modern word, guitar, was adopted into English from Spanish guitarra, derived from the Latin word cithara, which in turn was derived from the earlier Greek word kithara, which perhaps derives from Persian sihtar.
Sihtar itself is related to the Indian instrument, the sitar.
The modern guitar is descended from the Roman cithara brought by the Romans to Hispania around 40 AD, and further adapted and developed with the arrival of the four-string oud, brought by the Moors (Berbers) after their conquest of the Iberian peninsula in the 8th century.
[7400 Tibet / 7400 Mauritania / 7400 Jalatarang]
