October 2015
Vol. III, No. 10
Music in Ancient Mesopotamia
By: Uri Gabbay
We have a wealth of sources from ancient Mesopotamia: archeological, iconographical, and, most significantly, textual. Hundreds of thousands of cuneiform tablets in collections around the world shed light on the everyday life, economy, law, literature, and religion of ancient Mesopotamia. These sources also help us to understand ancient Mesopotamian music. They give us the rare opportunity to sample what the past sounded like.
Other sources for music are available as well. Archaeological finds include the remains of some musical instruments, and iconographic finds include representations of musicians and musical instruments on reliefs and cylinder seals. The written evidence also describes vocal and instrumental performances and their religious and cultural significance. Sometimes the archaeological, iconographical, and written materials can be correlated, but often it is difficult to fit them together in a larger context with any certainty.
Of course, the big question we are all interested in is: What did this music sound like? We naturally have no recordings of ancient Mesopotamian music, and therefore this music – as originally performed – will remain silent forever. Nevertheless, the wealth and diversity of the available sources does enable us to reconstruct many aspects of the music of ancient Mesopotamia.
Singers and musical instrument players
The expressive power of the singing of ancient Mesopotamian musicians is demonstrated in the following Sumerian proverb: “A scribe without a hand – a singer without a throat.” Singers can sometimes be identified in iconographic representations. They stand next to instrumentalists and hold their hands against their chest or stomach to enable diaphragmatic breathing while singing—a technique employed by vocalists today, too.
Some singers are presented in Mesopotamian iconography as beardless. Although this subject is much disputed, some of these representations may depict castrati. In other cultures castration has sometimes been employed to preserve the adolescent voice of male singers into adulthood. Another characteristic attribute of musicians is blindness. The cross-cultural link between musical talent and blindness is well known. In the Sumerian myth Enki and Ninmah, the goddess Ninmah creates various human creatures, and their destiny is then fixed by the god Enki. When Ninmah creates a blind person, Enki allots him the “art of the musician.”
The instruments
The remains of some musical instruments have survived. Best known are the inlays of lyres from the royal tombs of Ur from the mid-third millennium BCE. These remains permitted detailed reconstruction of the instruments themselves. In addition, there is a wealth of representations on reliefs, inlays, and cylinder seals that depict musicians, alone or in an ensemble, playing various types of musical instruments, including stringed instruments such as lyres and harps, percussion instruments such as drums, cymbals, and rattles, and aerophones such as different types of flutes.
Since musical instruments are objects that were manufactured, repaired, transferred, and of course played, they appear not only in texts related to music but in administrative texts, letters, and other genres. The problem is to identify the instruments named in the texts by matching them to archaeological finds and iconographical representations. Sometimes this is possible, but most identifications of musical instruments are much debated in modern scholarship.
One musical instrument whose identity has been established with a reasonable degree of certainty is the Sumerian sim instrument. An inscription of Gudea, ruler of Lagash in south Mesopotamia in the 22nd century BCE, describes a musical performance during a ceremony to mark the inauguration of a temple. One of the instruments mentioned in the inscription is the sim instrument. In addition to the inscription, there is also a large stone stele that graphically portrays the ceremony held for the same occasion. On this stele, reconstructed from fragments on the basis of similar steles, are depicted two musical instruments: a giant drum and a pair of cymbals. It is not unlikely that one of these instruments is to be identified with the sim instrument mentioned in the inscription.
But which is it, the drum or the cymbals? Several administrative texts written just a few decades after the Gudea inscription record transactions involving the sim instrument. One of these documents, for example, records the return of nine “pairs” of copper sim instruments, weighing roughly seven kilograms in total, to a musician after they were repaired. Thus, we are dealing with a copper instrument that comes in pairs and weighs less than a kilogram. The cymbals portrayed on the Gudea stele are, most likely, the sim instrument mentioned in the Gudea inscription.
The sound of music
What did ancient Mesopotamian music sound like? Unfortunately we will probably never know, but written sources provide some hints. One of the most common genres of scholarly texts in ancient Mesopotamia is lexical lists. These lists, which probably began as a scribal reference tool, evolved into an encyclopedic resource that catalogued in great detail many aspects of the world of ancient Mesopotamian scholars—objects, professions, animals, and so on. Some of these lists contain the names of the nine strings of a specific instrument, perhaps a harp.
Other lists record the names for the musical intervals between different strings, and these intervals in turn gave their name to seven scales known from texts that contain instructions on the tuning of the instrument. Although nine strings are named in the first set of lists, only seven are enumerated in the lists of intervals, indicating a heptatonic scale. The scales that can be reconstructed parallel those known from the classical tradition, such as the Dorian, Phrygian, and Lydian scales.
The names of the intervals and scales known from the lists appear on rare occasions in hymnic texts, where they prescribe musical accompaniment. The most famous such hymn, which also contains the most detailed musical instructions, is the Hurrian hymn to the moon goddess found in the city of Ugarit, dating to ca. 1400 BCE. On the bottom of the tablet appear the Akkadian terms for the intervals, probably referring to the scales to be played on the musical instrument while the hymn was sung. Several attempts to reconstruct the performance of the Hurrian hymn from Ugarit with its instrumental accompaniment have been made, but these reconstructions are the subject of much scholarly debate and controversy.
In any case, the Hurrian hymn from Ugarit demonstrates another important feature of music, namely, its universality. Music crosses borders and languages, and Akkadian terms that we know from south Mesopotamia were used as musical instructions for a hymn written in the Hurrian language on the shores of the Mediterranean. And the appreciation of music is something that we, too, share with ancient Mesopotamia.
Uri Gabbay is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Archaeology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
