<>Bronze lurs date back to the Nordic (Scandinavian) Bronze Age , probably to the first half of the 1st millennium BC (1000 BC-500 BC). They are roughly S-shaped conical tubes, without finger holes. They are end blown, lip vibrated like most brass instruments, and sound rather like a trombone. The "bell" end is really not a bell, but more of a decorated plate. A typical bronze lur is around two metres long.

Bronze lurs were frequently found in pairs, with the "sex" of one instrument going in and the other going out.  It is perhaps no accident that the shape of a lur pair resembles the right and left tusks of the mature woolly mammoth. For millennia, animal horns (in this case, tusks) have been used for signaling. Bronze age technology made possible the fabrication of replacements for what would have been a diminishing supply of tusks from mammoths, animals now thought to have become extinct perhaps a few millennia earlier. In the first millennium AD, Lurs made from wood have been found.

In the lower photo the handsome fellow blowing the horn is Joe Peknik,  Curator of the Musical instrument Collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art,  New York City. Joe was kind enough to give my family a behind the scene tour of some of the wonderful instruments in the Met  Collection.   I also had a blow on this strange horn and managed to sound like a sick cow!!  The METs Lur was found in a Danish Peat Bog which preserved the metal perfectly over the centuries.