 Douglas Alton Smith argues the long-necked variety should not be called lute at all because it existed for at least a millennium before the appearance of the short-necked instrument that eventually evolved into what is now known the lute.Musicologist Richard Dumbrill today uses the word more categorically to discuss instruments that existed millennia before the term "lute" was coined.Dumbrill documented more than 3000 years of iconographic evidence for the lutes in Mesopotamia, in his book "The Archaeomusicology of the Ancient Near East".