Nafir (, DMG an-nafīr, also nfīr, plural anfār; ) is a slender, shrill-sounding straight natural trumpet with a cylindrical tube and a conical metal bell, producing one or two notes. It was used as a military signaling instrument and as a ceremonial instrument in countries shaped by Islamic culture in North Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia. In Ottoman, Persian, and Mugulin miniatures, the nafīr is depicted in battle scenes. In Christian culture, it was displaced by or played alongside the curved tuba or horn, as seen in artwork dating to about the 14th century A.D.
Similar straight signal trumpets have been known since ancient Egyptian times and among the Assyrians and Etruscans. After the fall of the Roman Empire, the straight-tubed Roman tuba continued to flourish in the Middle East among the Sassanids and their Arabic successors. The Saracens, whose long metal trumpets greatly impressed the Christian armies during the Crusades, were ultimately responsible for reintroducing the instrument to Europe after a lapse of six hundred years. The straight trumpet type, called añafil in Spanish, also entered medieval Europe via medieval al-Andalus.
From the Middle Ages to the early 20th century, the nafīr and the straight or S-curved, conical metal trumpet kārna belonged to the Persian military bands and representative orchestras (naqqāra-khāna), which were played in Iran, India (called naubat) and were common as far as the Malay Archipelago (nobat). In the later Ottoman military bands (mehterhâne), the straight nafīr was distinguished from the twisted trumpet boru in which the straight tube was bent into a loop, influenced by such European instruments as the clarion.
The instruments retain ceremonial functions today in Morocco (nafīr played during Ramadan), Nigeria (kakaki played during Ramadan), and Malaysia (as a representative instrument of the sultanates, the silver nafiri in the nobat orchestra). Its cousin the Karnay is similarly used in Iran, Tajikistan Uzbekistan and Rajistan, and the Karnal in Nepal.
Nafir versus karnay The nafir has been compared to another trumpet, the karnay. The two may have been the same instrument. However, today a difference can be stated in terms of the instruments' dimensions. The karnay in Tajikistan, which reaches 190–210 cm in length, tends to have a larger diameter, about 3.3 centimeters.Д. Раҳимов. Касбу ҳунарҳои анъанавии тоҷикон. – Душанбе, 2014. – С. 40 - 42 (D. Rahimov. Traditional crafts of Tajiks. - Dushanbe, 2014. - p. 40 - 42.)
The nafir in Morocco averages 150 centimeters in length and 1.6cm in diameter on the outside of the tube.Anthony Baines: Encyclopedia of Musical Instruments. JB Metzler, Stuttgart 2005, p. 216, sv "Nafīr" According to the Persian music theorist Abd al-Qadir Maraghi (bin Ghaybi, ), the nafīr was 168 centimeters (two gaz) long.
The difference is visible in miniatures, with artists depicting some instruments as thinner. Also visible in miniatures is the gradual increase in the bore size (conically), which some karnays have in the same way a Tibetan horn does.
The Arabic nafīr was probably mostly a long, cylindrical metal trumpet with a high-pitched sound better suited to signaling than the deeper, duller sound of the conical trumpets such as the karna. The tonal difference was illustrated in the vocabulary of the Iraqi historian Ibn al-Tiqtaqa (1262–1310), according to which the nafīr player "shouted out" (sāha) the trumpet, while the player of the conical trumpet, here referred to as a būq, "blew" (nafacha). A writer in 1606, Nicot, said the trumpet was treble when compared with other trumpets that only played tenor and bass.
Another confusing point about karna versus nafirs concerns S-curved trumpets. Abd al-Qadir al-Maraghi described the karnā as curved in an S-shape, formed from two semicircles that are turned towards each other in the middle, like today's sringa in India. However, unlike the sringa, the S-curve karna could be very long.
The S-curved instrument was identified as a karrahnāy (or karnay) by ʿAbdalqādir ibn Ġaibī (died 1435). It is often paired with a slender straight trumpet in miniatures. Miniatures depicting the karrahnāy and nafir together indicate that the karrahnāy was also slim, unlike the sringa.
Origin
In Arabic, būq is a term used for conical horns, whether curved or straight, and regardless of the construction material, including shell, bone, ivory, wood, and metal. It should be understood that the term būḳ was used for all instruments with a conical tube, whether crescent-shaped or straight, irrespective of the material of its facture,—shell, horn, or metal. This is important because in Islamic areas, būq could mean a number of different instruments, including the būq al-nafir (horn of battle).
Conical horns have been common across many unassociated cultures, but the straight cylindrical tubed instruments had a narrow range of users who had ties to one another; the Greeks, Egyptians, and Romans interacted, as did the Egyptians and Assyrians and the Arabs, Persians, Turkmen, and Indians, all of whom had the cylindrical straight tubed trumpet, before medieval and early Renaissance Europeans further developed it.
Earliest trumpets and horns Trumpet instruments originally consisted either of relatively short animal horns, bones, and snail horns or of long, rather cylindrical tubes of wood and bamboo.Curt Sachs, 1967, p. 282
The former and their later replicas made of wood or metal (such as the Northern European Bronze Age lur) are attributed to the natural horns, while Curt Sachs (1930) suspected the origin of today's trumpets and trombones to be the straight natural trumpets made of bamboo or wood.
Egypt, Assyria, Rome, Greece, Israel The simple, straight trumpets are called tuba-shaped, derived from the tuba used in the Roman Empire. Other straight trumpets in antiquity were the Etruscan-Roman lituus and the Greek salpinx.
Tuba-shaped trumpets have been around since the mid-3rd millennium BC, as evidenced by illustrations from Mesopotamia and Ancient Egypt. According to written records, they were blown as signaling instruments in a military context or as ritual instruments in religious cults. As has been demonstrated with the ancient Egyptian sheneb, of which two specimens survive in good condition from the tomb of Tutankhamen (ruled ), the long trumpets produced only one or two notes and were not built to sustain the pressure that a very high third note would produce.
Among the early ritual instruments mentioned in the Old Testament is the curved ram's horn, the shofar, and the straight metal trumpet chazozra (hasosrah) made of hammered silver sheet.Joachim Braun: Music in Ancient Israel/Palestine. Archaeological, Written, and Comparative Sources. William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, Grand Rapids (Michigan) 2002, p. 11 In the Hebrew Bible, qeren also stands for an animal horn, which is used in different ways, but only in one place (Josh 6:5 EU) for a horn blown to produce sound. Queren is rendered in the Aramaic translations of the Bible (Targumim) as the etymologically derived qarnā, which later appears in the Book of Daniel (written 167–164 BC) as a musical instrument (a trumpet made of clay or metal). In the (Septuagint) Greek Bible, the original animal horn qarnā is rendered salpinx and in the Latin Vulgate tuba, thus reinterpreting it as a straight metal trumpet.Jeremy Montagu, Musical Instruments of the Bible. Scarecrow Press, Lanham 2002, pp. 56f, 97 The word qarnā becomes karnā in the medieval Arabic texts for a straight or curved trumpet with a conical tube (for the exact origin of the ancient trumpets see there).
In ancient times, war and ritual trumpets were widespread throughout the Mediterranean region and from Mesopotamia to South Asia. Like the chazozra of the Hebrews, these trumpets could only be blown by priests or by a select group of people. The Romans knew from the Etruscans the circularly curved horn cornu with a cup-shaped mouthpiece made of cast bronze and a stabilizing rod running across the middle. In the Roman Empire (27 BC – 284 AD), the Romans introduced a variant of the cornu with a narrower, G-shaped tube for use in military bands. This is pictured as a relief on Trajan's Column. The length of the tube could be up to 330 centimeters. The straight cylindrical tuba, which is around 120 centimeters long in the depictions, had a greater influence on posterity than this curved wind instrument. In the Loire Valley, which belonged to Roman Gaul, two Celtic long trumpets with cylindrical bronze tubes that could be dismantled into several parts were excavated.Anthony Baines, 1976, pp. 61–64
In late Roman times, a trumpet bent into a circle, like the cornu, was called a bucina. The difference between the straight and curved trumpets was presumably less in form than in use. While cornu and tuba were blown on the battlefield, the bucina presumably served as a signal trumpet in the camp, for example, at the changing of the guard.James W McKinnon: Buccina. In: Grove Music Online, 2001
Curved trumpets and horns and hornpipes may fit into a horn tradition, with the instruments curving as animal horns, much as the Roman bucina. After the fall of the Roman Empire, the tubular trumpet (made from sheet metal) was lost to Europe. The technology to bend metal tubes was also lost until the problem was re-addressed by Europeans in about the early 15th century, when illustrations began to appear of trumpets with curves.
After the reinvention of metal tube-bending technology, European trumpets began to adopt it, allowing instruments to have longer, thinner tubes (bent compactly), creating a wide range of brass instruments, including the clarion trumpet. The bent tube instruments moved into Persian and Turkish countries and to India, becoming the boru in Turkish, showing up in artwork in the 15th and 16th centuries.
The Latin bucina has been connected to the names used for a variety of unrelated horns and trumpets, including the albogue (a "horn pipe" in Spain), buki in Georgia and bankia in India (a regional name of the S-shaped curved trumpet, which includes shringa, ransingha, narsinga and kombu).
Persians, Arabs, Islam
The history of mounted military musicians begins with the Persian Sassanids (224–651), who banged kettledrums on elephants imported from India. Apart from little reliable evidence for the use of war elephants in the 3rd century, the sources indicate that the Sassanids used elephants in the 4th century against the Roman army and the Armenians, under Shapur II (ruled 309–379).Michael B. Charles: Elephant II. In the Sasanian Army. In: Encyclopædia Iranica, December 15, 1998 The Sassanids also used trumpets to call the start of battle and the troops to order. In the Persian national epic Shahnameh, trumpet players and drummers are mentioned as playing on the backs of elephants during battles against the Arabs at the beginning of the 7th century. Possibly Firdausi took over the situation in his time, for which mounted war musicians are otherwise documented, in the historical account.Bruce P. Gleason: Cavalry Trumpet and Kettledrum Practice from the Time of the Celts and Romans to the Renaissance. In: The Galpin Society Journal, Vol. 61, April 2008, pp. 231–239, 251, here p. 232