Kaleea, The word dulcimer appears 3 times in the King James version, all in the book of Daniel. It's talking about Nebuchadnezzar, so the Persian origin sounds plausible.

I'm not up on Persion music but I hear a lot of Lebanese music. I don't know how the music is written down but it has a lot of notes that would be difficult to represent using European notation.

      - Mark