Zill
small metallic cymbals used in belly dancing and similar performances
Zills, zils, or sagat, also known as finger cymbals, are small metallic cymbals used in belly dancing and similar performances. They are similar to Tibetan tingsha bells. In Western music, several pairs can be set in a frame to make a tambourine.
Other names include nuqaisāt (after the naqus) and ṣunnūj ṣaghīra in Arabic, sanj angshati in Persian, zil in Turkish.
History
Zills, or finger cymbals, are part of a family of musical instruments known as clappers. Clappers are musical instruments made of wood, bone, metal, and other substances that are played by being struck against each other. Clappers come in pairs and are often held in the hands, fastened together, or strapped to the performer's fingers. The clapper family also includes spoons, bones and castanets.
One of the earliest forms of clappers are wooden krotala already present in Greece around 500 BC. Ancient Greek potteries depict men and women celebrating at Dionysian festivals, some of them playing krotala. From known representations, ancient Greeks used metallic cymbals, but they held only one cymbal in each hand and clapped them together to strike them.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 18, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q203449. The Library of Congress control number is sh99011316. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference.
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This entry incorporates text from “Zill” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.