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Western Civilization has a few origin stories for strings: the Greeks claim it was discovered, rather than being invented, by Orpheus, who found a turtle shell with sinew from the no-longer-resident turtle, which emitted a pleasing note when plucked. (This bit of tradition lead the Renaissance lutenists to associate their lute with the turtle, in naming and often in symbology.)

The Bible is silent on the origin of strings, while assigning Jabal (son of Lamech, son of Cain, son of Adam) as "the Father (Ancestor) of all who play the harp and flute." This would place the invention of strings before the Flood, leaving the possibility of re-invention post-flood.

China, while not claiming an invention time or individual for the actual strings, claims impressive ages for certain instruments (as much as 35,000 years).

It is quite likely that strings developed in many places at many times, based on observation of the nature of things. The Chinese Ch'in (long Zither) type instruments appear to have developed from bamboo zithers, perhaps from a realization that the tongue of a note-bar can be replaced by a single thread or twisted aggregation of fibers. The earliest existing examples of Chinese harps and zithers are strung with twisted silk strings. In Western civilization, where silk (and the worms which produce it) were unknown until Marco Polo, used gut (serosa from sheep, primarily), twisted and dried, for strings into antiquity, and may have started using sinews of animals (as the Orphean Myth claims).

It is unlikely that we will ever know where the first strings were made, who had the idea, and what caused them to do so: whether to replace existing, naturally-occurring strings like animal sinew, or as a byproduct of spun thread, or from some other no-longer-imaginable cause.

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Q: Where did the strings originate?
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