“Along with Greece, Mesopotamia is the only place where ancient musical notation has been found,” Ziegler adds. The text is accompanied by musical indications specifying the mode and intervals to be played. It is an ode to Nikkal, a goddess believed to favor human fertility. The inscriptions on the clay tablets also include the oldest song ever discovered: the Hymn of Ugarit, found in Syria and dated at 1400 BC.
Most of the palace musicians were functionaries, who also assumed the duty of teaching music to the young women of the court.” “Among these texts, the correspondence between the musicians and the king shows that they were very much a part of life in the city: they performed during religious ceremonies, or festivities to celebrate the king’s return from the battlefield.
“These 20,000 texts in cuneiform script represent 20 years of the life of the palace, before it was destroyed by Hammurabi of Babylon in 1759 BC,” Ziegler recounts. The most remarkable examples were found in the excavations of the Royal Palace of Mari, in modern-day Syria. Yet Woolley's ingenious idea of making plaster casts of the empty spaces it had left enables us to admire them today.” The oldest known chantĪlthough it has yielded relatively few such archaeological remains due to its unfavorable climate, Mesopotamia has proved a rich source of archives written on clay tablets, including some that document in minute detail the role of musicians in the region’s city-states. 3 “We are extremely fortunate that these instruments, decorated with gold and precious stones, have survived, as the wood they were made of had completely decomposed. “These lyres, dating from 2500 BC were found in the tombs of the royal family of Ur,” says Nele Ziegler, a historian specializing in Mesopotamia and co-curator of the exhibition. 3000 BC-the earliest string instruments are Mesopotamian: the famous Lyres of Ur, unearthed by the British archaeologist Leonard Woolley in the 1920s in present-day Iraq. However, while the oldest percussions are indeed Egyptian-castanet-like clappers dating from the Thinite period, ca.
The exceptionally dry climate of Egypt made it possible for researchers to recover nearly 600 remains of harps, flutes, sistra (metal rattles) and lyres, among others-quite a treasure trove considering the relative rarity of instruments from other early civilizations. Yet what a thrill it is to see a virtually intact Egyptian harp!” “They are never seen in musical instrument museums because it was decided, back in the 19th century, to place them in archaeological collections instead, alongside all other relics. “In fact, the objects brought together on this occasion are largely unknown to music lovers,” explains the Egyptologist Sibylle Emerit, 2 one of the eight curators involved. The list of institutions that have lent exhibits for the project-no fewer than 22, including the Louvre, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the British Museum-testifies to its scale and complexity. 1 “Music! Echoes of Antiquity” is a world first: no museum in France or anywhere in the world has ever hosted such a comprehensive event on ancient music. What did the music of the ancients sound like? What role did it play in the life of Egyptian, Mesopotamian, Greek and Roman societies? These are among the questions addressed by an exhibition at the regional branch of the Louvre in Lens which is now heading to Madrid and Barcelona.