Well, well! I never heard of an archlute before.

Sometimes I saw that the history of musical instruments is the story of the search for low notes. This impractically long instrument is a case in point.

Nobody knows this but me, but the pyramids of Egypt were originally part of a scheme to stretch super-long gut strings from the point of an obelisk (never built)to the edges of the pyramids, thus producing the longest and lowest harp in the world. Then someone figured out that you can make low notes by merely making strings thicker, and the pyramids were converted to funerary monuments.