Written in step with S. Van Dyck Prior to the invention in Italy of instruments we know today as the violins, violas and cellos, habitual other stringed instruments existed in different times and parts with regard to the world with varying features in respective with the violin, some predating the violin by several millennia. Standard Asian and Mongolian nomads may have been the first until bow the head stringed instruments, their idea spreading unto East and Sunset Asia as sluice out as the Middle East. The ancient Greek kithara and the medieval Chinese erhu are stringed instruments excursively related to the violin. The ravanastron is the oldest known ancestor of the violin, a bowed string instrument existing in Sri Lanka parce que significantly back as 5000 BC. It comprised of exactly alike 22-inch string spanning three octaves, which is similar to the collateral phonemic range and string length of all four strings respecting the modern contrabass. Today the ravanastron is made leaving out half a coconut casing with the loophole occulted goodwill goat hide, and attached to a bamboo stick and a steel string. A later, numerous direct relative touching the violin is the rebab, which became prominent onward Muslim trading routes starting hall the 8th Century. The instrument's dichotomous silk strings were attached to an endpin and strung unto pegs and unisonous to fifths, much after this fashion the modernist violin. The rebab's pear-shaped college was grown not counting a gourd with a long backbone. It was aground in the obverse and played added to a resined bow. Fated into being in the 10th Century, therebec was the first bowed stringed instrument to be played atop the put in shape primrose under the chin. The Moors conquered Spain far out the 8th Cwt and brought instructive new high to the Iberian Peninsula from centuries en route to come. Developing from the rebabas well as its Byzantine frater, the lyra, the rebectypically had three strings and a long, boat-shaped body carved barring one solid piece of yule log. Customary in Western Old world starting in the 14th Century, the vielle, or Renaissance racket, evolved from the rebec and rebab in France. Thanks to the addition of a bull fiddle, a leaf-shaped peg box and five gut strings, it started to resemble the modern violin. The viola criminal lawyer braccio came soon after, the closest ancestor en route to the modern violin, with f-holes instead apropos of the vielle's c-shaped holes. The violin soon outmoded its aforementioned predecessors, as it became the choice design of treble bowed string instrument by the start of the 17th Century and the Baroque Era.<\p>