A tortoise shell closed with oxhide, with strings like the strings of a ram stretched out: this was the most remote ancestor of the guitar in Greece in 2000 BC

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It was this rustic instrument called chelys that, over time, became the lyre - which, in turn, got its name from the Roman guitar during the Caesarian Empire. “This version of the instrument practically disappeared with the decadence of Rome”, says Maurício Monteiro, a musicologist from USP's History Department. "But it resurfaced, much more like the current guitar, in 8th century Arabia, when the pear-shaped resonance box was added." This was the lute that, with the Arab invasions in the Iberian Peninsula, ended up being adopted by Europeans under the name of Moorish guitar. It was then that the Iberian peoples reduced their size, changed the sound box to its current format, similar to the number eight, and renamed it the vihuela - the popular viola. At this time, between the 10th and 12th centuries, it was distinguished from today's guitar in that it has several furins carved in the resonance box, instead of a single hole - the rosette - as the instrument became known worldwide.

One of the first known guitars, in Brazilian lands, was that of the Bahian poet Gregório de Mattos Guerra (1633/1696), who in the 17th century was already singing his verses accompanied by a viola made of gourd manufactured by him, according to the researcher Araripe Júnior (1848/1911). Subsequently, the guitar was used as a propagator of the “modinha”, a musical genre created by the Brazilian mulatto Domingos Caldas Barbosa (1738/1800), according to José Ramos Tinhorão. In Brazil, the instrument emerged as a natural evolution of the wire viola, which gained yet another string order in the low region, starting to have the tuning mi, lá, reverse, sol, si, mi, from low to high. As a result of the viola, the double strings were transformed into single strings and, to compensate for the loss of sound resulting from that, it had an increased size, as in fact the augmentation of the name certifies 'Guitar'.

Sources:

http://dicionariompb.com.br/violao/dados-artisticos

https://super.abril.com.br/cultura/onde-e-quando-surgiu-o-violao/