Buzzer vs. Bullroarer

Two whirled sound-makers are forever mistaken for each other. The bullroarer is a flat slat on a single cord, swung in a circle until it rotates about its own axis and roars. The buzz disc is a plate or bone threaded on a twisted double cord, pumped between the hands so that it spins first one way and then the other, giving a high whirr. They are different instruments, with different sounds and different motions, and the ethnographic and classical literature confuses them constantly — sometimes in the very same sentence. This page separates them. But the deeper point is that they belong together: again and again, from the love-magic of Theocritus’ Greece to the ceremonial grounds of the American Southwest to the reindeer tundra of Siberia, the people who kept one kept the other. The buzzer and the bullroarer are not rivals for a single slot. They are a pair.

Two mechanisms, two sounds

The confusion is understandable, because at a distance the two look alike: a small object, a cord, a whirling motion, a droning noise, and — over and over — a former ritual instrument that has come down to us as a children’s toy. Up close they are unmistakable.

In the Hornbostel–Sachs scheme the bullroarer sits firmly at 412.22, among the whirling aerophones whose sounding element turns on its own axis. The buzz disc, whose plate spins about an axis lying in its own plane, is filed one slot over, at 412.21. That one-digit gap is exactly where the trouble starts: the two categories are adjacent, easily transposed, and — as we will see — routinely merged. The distinction the numbers encode is real and physical, but the numbering itself invites the very slippage it was meant to prevent.

One family trait binds the two instruments more tightly than the classification admits: both are prone to decay into toys. Across Eurasia the same object turns up as a solemn wind-charm in one generation and a whirligig in a child’s hands in the next — the Dutch snorrebot, the swung blade; the Sakha ísiirär, a droning aerophone remembered as a plaything. The buzz disc has the same double life. When the ritual context fades, both dwindle to the same shelf of the toy cupboard, and it is on that shelf, stripped of the ceremony that once told them apart, that collectors and lexicographers muddle them.

The Greek tangle: iynx and rhombos

The classic muddle, and the classic disentangling, are both Greek. The reference work is A. S. F. Gow’s 1934 study in the Journal of Hellenic Studies, “ΙΥΓΞ, ΡΟΜΒΟΣ, Rhombus, Turbo,” which sorts out two magical instruments that ancient and modern scholars alike had run together.

The iynx, Gow shows, is the buzz disc. “It is a spoked wheel (sometimes it might be a disc) with two holes on either side of the centre. A cord is passed through one hole and back through the other; if the loop on one side of the instrument is held in one hand, the two ends… in the other, and the tension alternately increased and relaxed, the twisting and untwisting of the cords will cause the instrument to revolve rapidly, first in one direction and then in the other.” That is the buzzer, described to the letter. It took its name from the wryneck bird (iynx) that Aphrodite, in Pindar’s Pythian 4, first bound to a four-spoked wheel and gave to men as a charm to compel love. And Gow notes it is “a common attribute of Eros, especially on Apulian vases” — which is precisely the scene engraved at the head of this page.

The rhombos is the bullroarer. Gow calls it “pretty plainly the turndun of Australian aboriginals, or bull-roarer of modern England. In Australia this is an oblong piece of wood to the point of which a cord is attached. The instrument is swung in a circle by the cord and emits a muttering roar which rises in pitch as the speed is increased.” Different object, different motion, different noise.

Now the tangle. In Theocritus’ second Idyll, the love-sick Simaetha works a spell, and both instruments are in her hands: the refrain turns on her iynx — the magic wheel she sets spinning — while at line 30 she swings a bronze rhombos, a bullroarer. “The purpose is the same,” Gow writes, “the method… different.” Ancient commentators could not keep them apart: the scholia on Theocritus, Gow says, “have already… identified iynx and rhombos,” and then “confound the confusion” further. He concludes that the whole tradition of glosses defining the rhombos as a “wheel” is “in all probability due to that confusion” — a two-thousand-year-old case of a bullroarer mislabelled a buzzer. The two instruments were so alike in function, and so often used side by side, that even the Greeks who used them slid the names into one.

The verdict on the Eros figure

Which brings us back to the engraving above. Daremberg and Saglio’s great Dictionnaire des Antiquités Grecques et Romaines reproduces it under the caption “Eros jouant au rhombus” — Eros playing the bullroarer. He is not. What the winged figure holds is a loop of cord strung between his two hands with a small object slung at its middle: the iynx, worked by twisting and pumping, exactly as Gow describes it and exactly as it appears on the Apulian vases he cites. A rhombos would hang from a single cord and be swung overhead in a circle; nothing here is being swung. The figure is a buzzer, captioned as a bullroarer — the confusion made visible, in the standard reference itself. The atlas documents the Sabazios mysteries as a genuine instance of the whirled rhombos, on the authority of the ancient scholiast on Clement; and the atlas now illustrates that record with Daremberg and Saglio’s companion plate — the one that shows the rhombos and the iynx side by side, correctly told apart.

Both in the same cult

The Greek case is not only a lesson in confusion; it is the first entry in our catalog of co-occurrence. Simaetha’s spell uses both instruments at once. And in the Dionysiac mysteries the toys with which the Titans lured the infant god — catalogued by Clement of Alexandria from a lost Orphic poem — include, in one breath, “a cone (konos) and a rhombus and limb-bending toys,” and, in the fuller prose list, a spinning top (strobilos), a ball, knucklebones, and a mirror besides. The bullroarer sits in the one sacred inventory beside the cone and the top — whirled and spun things gathered together. Whatever else the mystery cult kept, it kept objects of the whirling kind in more than one form, and did not trouble to rank them.

Egypt: a distribution built on the wrong instrument

If Greece shows the confusion inside a single spell, Egypt shows what it can do to a map. Open a mid-century survey of Egyptian music and you will find the bullroarer listed among the instruments of the pharaohs. The listing descends from one scholar: Hans Hickmann, the great cataloguer of Egyptian instruments, who in 1955 announced two “unknown Egyptian sound-tools” — the Schwirrholz (bullroarer) and the Schwirrscheibe (whirring disc) — and carried both into his standard 1961 volume on Egyptian music history. French summaries of his inventory duly repeat the rhombes and disques ronfleurs down the decades.

The claim did not survive scrutiny. Reviewing the evidence in 1981, Marcelle Duchesne-Guillemin was blunt: the bullroarer “is totally absent from Egypt”, and Hickmann had “misinterpreted depictions of vertical harps” — the long slanting silhouette of a harp under an arm, read as a slat on a cord. She added, for good measure, that a supposed specimen in the Ashmolean Museum — an Iranian piece — was wrongly catalogued as a bull-roarer. Three thousand years of dynastic art and archaeology, sistra and clappers and trumpets in abundance, and not one securely identified roarer among them.

What Egypt does yield — and here the story turns from confusion to co-occurrence — is buzzers, and late ones. The excavations at Karanis, a Roman-period town in the Fayum, produced pierced discs of the classic buzz type, spun on a twisted cord; they are the physical reality behind Hickmann’s whirring-disc category, and they belong to the Greco-Roman centuries, not the pharaohs. And in exactly that Greco-Roman horizon the true bullroarer finally enters Egypt too — as a Greek import. A torn papyrus from Gurob in the Fayum, the earliest witness to the “toys of Dionysus”, lists the rhombos among the sacred objects of an Orphic rite; and a Ptolemaic terracotta from the same district shows a cult attendant swinging a reel-shaped object on a thong that the British Museum can only call “an incense-diffuser or a bull-roarer”. Roarer and buzzer arrive in the record together, in the same district and the same few centuries, one on a cult papyrus and one from a house-mound — the familiar pairing, at the mouth of the Nile as everywhere else.

The moral is double. A bullroarer was claimed for dynastic Egypt on the strength of a name, a misread image, and a neighbouring instrument, and the claim stood in the literature for a generation — the buzzer/bullroarer slippage operating at the scale of a civilisation. It still propagates: popular accounts to this day put a bullroarer in Tutankhamun’s tomb, though the tomb’s instruments are fully published — two sistra, a pair of ivory clappers, two trumpets — and no excavation record calls anything in it a roarer. The nearest object, the clappers, is not even a whirled instrument. When the mechanism is checked, the pharaonic roarer evaporates; what remains is a Roman-era Fayum where the two whirled instruments, Greek rhombos and spun buzz-disc, at last turn up side by side.

The Russian terminological swamp

If Greek is where the confusion is oldest, Russian is where it is thickest. Russian and Soviet organology has a rich, loosely-applied vocabulary for whirled sound-tools — жужжалка (buzzer), гуделка (hummer), вертушка (spinner), фуркало, вьюшка — and it maps them onto the Hornbostel–Sachs numbers inconsistently, so that 412.21 and 412.22 are swapped or merged from one author to the next. The atlas ran straight into this while cataloguing Siberia, and the terms cannot be taken at face value: a source’s жужжалка may be a true bullroarer, and its bullroarer-numbered instrument may be a disc buzzer.

Concrete cases:

• Chukchi vyutkunen (выюткунэн). A whirled instrument “shaped like a bird’s feather, with carved notches imitating the plumage,” swung to imitate the blizzard. Despite the buzzer-flavoured Russian name, this is a swung feather-blade — a bullroarer — and the 2019 Chukchi survey files it at 412.22, the bullroarer index, distinguishing it from true disc buzzers in the same repertoire.
• Nivkh p’uvr. Nadezhda Mamcheva records this whirling aerophone as made “in two varieties under the one Nivkh name”: an elongated sharp-ended plaque and a large-buttoned form. She classes it at 412.22, the bullroarer index — but the “button” variety is morphologically a buzzer. One indigenous name, one classification number, two mechanisms bundled underneath.
• Enets. Here the two instruments are named in a single sentence: a whirled hummer (поси in the forest dialect, вырвыр in the tundra), “in the shape of a spindle or a feather,” whirled to summon the wind — standing right beside the киука, the button buzzer. The bullroarer-type and the buzzer-type are catalogued together, as one people’s pair.
• Nganasan and Sakha. The Nganasan whirled howler (биахеры) is a wind-tool that survives as a toy, kept beside its own twisted-cord buzzer; and among the Sakha the swung droning ísiirär — the one true roarer (гуделка) in the set — sits in a single cluster of whirring toys with three twisted-cord buzzers (жужжалки), the roarer nearly lost among them.
• Mansi. The wind-calling “flying board” is a thin plank spun on a cord, which the ethnographer is careful to hold “distinct from the two-hole children’s toy buzzers it survived alongside” — the two mechanisms coexisting in one community, and named apart. Yet the same source files the swung plank at 412.21, the buzzer number, where its motion argues for 412.22. The Mansi record is the trap in miniature.

The Russian material is thus both a warning and a witness. A warning, because the terminology cannot be read off literally — the atlas treats every Siberian жужжалка and гуделка as a claim to be checked against the described mechanism, not as a settled identification. And a witness, because in case after case — Enets, Nivkh, Mansi — the buzzer and the bullroarer turn up in the same repertoire, under kindred names, doing kindred work on the weather. The confusion in the sources is itself a trace of the pairing in the field.

The co-occurrence catalog

Here is the heart of the matter. Set aside the confusion for a moment and ask a plain question: where a culture kept a bullroarer, did it also keep a buzzer, and vice versa? The answer, across every region with good documentation, is yes — strikingly often, and in the same ritual world.

Ancient Greece — the same spell, the same mystery

Already established above: Simaetha in Theocritus’ second Idyll works her love-charm with the iynx (buzzer) and the rhombos (bullroarer) together, and the Dionysiac toy-list preserved by Clement gathers the rhombos with the konos and the spinning top. Both mechanisms, one cultic hand.

North America — Culin’s two sections

Stewart Culin’s Games of the North American Indians (1907) treats the “bull-roarer” and the “buzz” in adjacent sections — and the same peoples keep turning up in both. Culin opens the bull-roarer section by naming its ceremonial users outright: “the bull-roarer, or whizzer, used ceremonially by the Hopi, Zuñi, Navaho, Apache, and other tribes.” Then, a few pages on, the buzz section lists disc buzzers for the Zuñi (a gourd-shell disc, huwawananai) and the Hopi (clay-stone discs from Oraibi) — the very same peoples. The atlas already records both instruments together for the Navajo and the Zuñi, whose entries read “bullroarer and related buzz.”

The Plains give the tidiest pairing of all. Among the Teton Dakota, Culin records a bull-roarer — chaŋ kabletuŋtuŋpi, “wood having edges,” whirled around the head with a whizzing noise — and, in the buzz section, a bone spun on a twisted cord called huŋ yukhmuŋpi, “making the bone hum by twisting the cord.” The Oglala keep the same pair (the bull-roarer tateka yuhmuŋpi and a bone buzz). The shared verb-root — yuhmuŋ, to spin or hum — runs through both names: one people, one idea of a humming spun thing, expressed in two instruments.

And it is here, in the Arctic reaches of Culin’s survey, that the confusion and the co-occurrence fuse. John Murdoch’s Point Barrow collection (1892) furnishes the Western Eskimo buzz — a painted pine board spun on a doubled sinew string — and a whirligig besides; the buzzer is well attested across the Inuit world, from Baffin Land to Cape York, Greenland. Yet at Smith Sound, Greenland, Culin reports a figure-eight bone buzz “described by Dr A. L. Kroeber under the name of hieqtaq, or bull-roarer.” A disc buzzer, entered into the record as a bullroarer by a first-rate ethnographer. The same Inuit and Yupik communities that spun buzzers also swung true bullroarers — the St. Lawrence Island “devil-chaser,” whirled to drive off spirits — and the literature, faced with both, blurred the line between them.

Siberia — the pair on the tundra

The Russian cases above are, read the other way, a co-occurrence list. The Enets name the whirled wind-hummer and the button buzzer in one sentence. The Nivkh make both a sharp-ended plaque and a buttoned buzzer under a single name. The Mansi keep the swung wind-board and, expressly “alongside” it, the two-hole toy buzzer. Wherever the Siberian record is detailed enough to describe the object rather than merely name it, the bullroarer and the buzzer prove to be neighbours in the same house.

Brazil — the Karajá, a cautionary pairing

Central Brazil supplies the case that most repays care. When Fritz Krause visited the Karajá of the Araguaia (1908; published 1911), what he saw in the secret mask-dance complex — the complex women may not intrude on, on pain of death — was the buzzing disc, the Surrscheibe, not a bullroarer. Otto Zerries, surveying South American sound-instruments in 1953, linked both the buzz disc and the bullroarer to that same women-taboo mask complex; but the instrument actually documented among the Karajá is the buzzer, with the bullroarer only inferred by analogy. This is the pattern in its most instructive form: the two instruments occupy the same secret ritual slot, so closely that a comparativist reaches for both — yet the field report attests only one, and honest cataloguing must say which. The atlas files the Karajá bullroarer as possible, not confirmed.

New Guinea and beyond

At the level of the scholarly literature the pairing is old and explicit: A. C. Haddon’s The Study of Man (1898) treats the bullroarer and the buzz/whirligig in successive chapters, as siblings in a single family of whirled toys with sacred pasts. Buzzing discs and spinning tops are widespread across Melanesia as children’s playthings in the same societies whose men’s cults guard the bullroarer, though the ethnography rarely pins a specific buzzer to a specific bullroarer cult with the tidiness of the American or Siberian cases. And on the fringes of the complex sit the genuinely intermediate objects: the Yi Nisu ritual specialist in Yunnan whirls a thin pine slat that buzzes — a bullroarer by form, a buzzer by the name of its sound, and a cutting-blade against spirits by function — a reminder that the two categories shade into one another at the edges as well as the centre.

Why it matters

This is not pedantry. For an atlas whose central question is whether the bullroarer complex spread from a single deep source or arose again and again, every attestation is a data point on a distribution map — and a buzzer misfiled as a bullroarer is a false point, one that can pull a map into a shape the evidence does not support. When Kroeber’s Smith Sound buzz is entered as a “bull-roarer,” or a Siberian disc buzzer inherits a bullroarer’s classification number, the roarer’s range silently swells. Diffusion arguments are only as good as the identifications beneath them, and the identifications are exactly what the buzzer/bullroarer confusion corrupts.

The corruption runs both ways. A true bullroarer can hide under a buzzer’s name — the Chukchi vyutkunen, a swung feather-blade filed at the bullroarer index despite its buzzer-ish name — and so drop out of the roarer’s map where it belongs. Terminology that cannot be trusted in either direction is worse than useless; it is actively misleading, and it clusters, unhelpfully, in exactly the regions (Siberia, the Arctic) where the deep-diffusion question is most live.

So the atlas’s working practice is to trust the described mechanism, never the bare name. Where a record turns on a slat swung on one cord, it is a bullroarer; where it turns on a disc pumped on a twisted double cord, it is a buzzer; where the source gives a name but not enough of the object to decide — and Russian and folk vocabularies routinely do — the record says so, and the ambiguity is flagged rather than papered over. The Dutch snorrebot and the Ukrainian фуркало earned their places on the bullroarer map only after a 1940s definitional article and Hrinchenko’s dictionary, respectively, resolved them as swung blades and not two-hole buzzers. That is the standard: no instrument is admitted to the roarer’s distribution on the strength of a word alone.

And having drawn the line firmly, the atlas can afford to say the larger thing plainly. The buzzer and the bullroarer are genuinely distinct instruments that the record must not conflate — and they are, just as genuinely, companions. They share a motion, a droning voice, a habit of dwindling into toys, and, over and over, a single ritual context and a single people. The confusion in the literature is not merely an error to be corrected. It is the fossil of a real and ancient partnership.

Co-occurrence at a glance

Several rows rest on print-only ethnography (Culin 1907; Krause 1911; Zerries 1953; the Siberian surveys of Sheikin and Mamcheva) whose details are quoted here from the sources named below.

Key sources

• Gow, A. S. F. 1934. “ΙΥΓΞ, ΡΟΜΒΟΣ, Rhombus, Turbo.” Journal of Hellenic Studies 54:1–13.
• Theocritus, Idyll 2 (the spell of Simaetha); Pindar, Pythian 4.213–19 (Aphrodite and the iynx).
• Clement of Alexandria, Protrepticus 2 (the toys of Dionysus, from a lost Orphic poem).
• Daremberg, C. and Saglio, E. Dictionnaire des Antiquités Grecques et Romaines, s.v. “Rhombus,” figs. 5940–41.
• Hickmann, H. 1955. “Unbekannte ägyptische Klangwerkzeuge (Aërophone). 1. Schwirrholz und Schwirrscheibe.” Die Musikforschung 8:151–57; cf. Hickmann, Musikgeschichte in Bildern: Ägypten (1961).
• Duchesne-Guillemin, M. 1981. “Music in Ancient Mesopotamia and Egypt.” World Archaeology 12(3):287–97.
• Wilfong, T. G. 2014. “The Sonic Landscape of Karanis.” In Karanis Revealed, Kelsey Museum Publications.
• Hordern, J. 2000. “Notes on the Orphic Papyrus from Gurob.” Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik 129:131–40; Manniche, L. 1976. Musical Instruments from the Tomb of Tut’ankhamūn (Griffith Institute).
• Culin, S. 1907. Games of the North American Indians. 24th Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology, “Bull-roarer” and “Buzz” sections, pp. 750–57.
• Murdoch, J. 1892. “The Point Barrow Eskimo,” 9th Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology.
• Krause, F. 1911. In den Wildnissen Brasiliens (Leipzig Araguaya Expedition, 1908).
• Zerries, O. 1953. “The Bull-roarer among South American Indians.” Revista do Museu Paulista n.s. 7:275–309; cf. Zerries, Das Schwirrholz (1942).
• Sheikin, Yu. I., and colleagues, 2019 (Chukchi vyutkunen); 2002 (Enets, Nganasan) — Siberian organological surveys, Traditional Culture and related.
• Mamcheva, N. 2008–2010. On Nivkh whirling aerophones (Izvestia RGPU im. Gertsena; instrument monograph).
• Dyakonova, V. 2019. On the Sakha ísiirär. Traditional Culture.
• Haddon, A. C. 1898. The Study of Man.
• Hornbostel, E. M. von, and Sachs, C. 1914. “Systematik der Musikinstrumente” (classes 412.21, 412.22).