Listen to the oldest piece of music in the world
In the early 1950s, a team of French archaeologists unearthed a series of clay tablets from the 14th century BC in the ancient Syrian city of Ugarit, also known as Ras Samra.
It quickly became apparent that these tablets were music-related. Inscribed in cuneiform script in the ancient Hurrian language, with some Akkadian terms, they essentially constituted a form of musical notation.
Among these tablets was a devotional hymn written 3,400 years ago, which is now recognized as the oldest preserved song with accompanying notes in the world.
This discovery was of great significance, as it demonstrated that musical scale and harmony were known and had been evolving far earlier than previously thought.
More specifically, it confirmed that harmony existed as far back as 3,400 years ago, challenging the prevailing musicological view that ancient harmony originated 2,000 years ago with the Ancient Greeks.
Experts have suggested that Ugarit’s discovery “resets the entire theory of the origin of today’s Western music.”
For over fifteen years, Dr. Anne Kilmer, a University of California Assyriology professor and curator of the Berkeley Museum of Anthropology, has been grappling with the sonic “translation” of this unique piece.
In 1972, she formulated an interpretation of the song based on a study of its notation.
The digital rendition of the piece may lack the richness and depth of the original Sumerian voices, but it provides a glimpse into the composition, melody, and harmony of this ancient culture, even though the precise rhythm remains to be determined.
Listen here
And in a different rendition:
