The Hurrian songs (or Hurrian Hymns) are a collection of music written in cuneiform on clay tablets excavated from the ancient city of Ugarit, a headland in northern Syria, which date to approximately 1400 BCE.Marguerite Yon, The City of Ugarit at Tell Ras Shamra (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2006): 24. (179 pages) One of these tablets, which is nearly complete, contains the Hurrian Hymn to Nikkal (also known as the Hurrian cult hymn or "a zaluzi-prayer to the gods," or simply "h.6"), making it the oldest surviving substantially complete work of notated music in the world. While the composers' names of some of the fragmentary pieces are known, h.6 is an anonymous work.
History
The complete song is one of about 36 such hymns in cuneiform writing, found on fragments of clay tablets excavated in the 1950s from the Royal Palace at Ugarit (present-day Ras Shamra, Syria),K. Marie Stolba, The Development of Western Music: A History, brief second edition (Madison: Brown & Benchmark Publishers, 1995), p. 2.; M[artin] L[itchfield] West, "The Babylonian Musical Notation and the Hurrian Melodic Texts", Music and Letters 75, no. 2 (May 1994): 161–79, citation on 171. in a stratum dating from the fourteenth century BCE,Marcelle Duchesne-Guillemin, "Sur la restitution de la musique hourrite", Revue de Musicologie 66, no. 1 (1980): 5–26, citation on p. 10. but is the only one surviving in substantially complete form.Anne Kilmer, "Mesopotamia §8(ii)", The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, second edition, edited by Stanley Sadie and John Tyrrell (London: Macmillan Publishers, 2001).
An account of the group of shards was first published in 1955 and 1968 by Emmanuel Laroche, who identified as parts of a single clay tablet the three fragments catalogued by the field archaeologists as RS 15.30, 15.49, and 17.387. In Laroche's catalogue, the hymns are designated h. (for ”Hurrian”) 2–17, 19–23, 25–6, 28, 30, along with smaller fragments RS. 19.164 g, j, n, o, p, r, t, w, x, y, aa, and gg. The complete hymn is h.6 in this list.Emmanuel Laroche, Le palais royal d' Ugarit 3: Textes accadiens et hourrites des archives Est, Ouest et centrales, 2 vols., edited by Jean Nougayrol, Georges Boyer, Emmanuel Laroche, and Claude-Frédéric-Armand Schaeffer, 1:327–35 and 2: plates cviii–cix (Paris: C. Klincksieck, 1955):; "Documents en langue houritte provenent de Ras Shamra", in Ugaritica 5: Nouveaux textes accadiens, hourrites et ugaritiques des archives et bibliothèques privées d'Ugarit, edited by Claude-Frédéric-Armand Schaeffer and Jean Nougayrol, 462–96. Bibliothèque archéologique et historique / Institut français d'archéologie de Beyrouth 80; Mission de Ras Shamra 16 (Paris: Imprimerie nationale P. Geuthner; Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1968). In the latter, the transcribed text of h.6 is on p. 463, with the cuneiform text reproduced on p. 487. A revised text of h.6 was published in 1975.Manfried Dietrich and Oswald Loretz, "Kollationen zum Musiktext aus Ugarit", Ugarit-Forschungen 7 (1975): 521–22.
Following Laroche's work, Assyriologist Anne Draffkorn Kilmer and musicologist Marcelle Duchesne-Guillemin worked together in the 1970s to understand the meaning of the tablets, concluding that one tablet presented tuning methods for a Babylonian lyre, another referred to musical intervals.Anon., "The Oldest Song in the World " (Amaranth Publishing, 2006). (Accessed 12 January 2011).
Tablet h.6 contains the lyrics for a hymn to Nikkal, an Ancient Near Eastern goddess of orchards, and instructions for a singer accompanied by a nine-stringed sammûm, a type of harp or, much more likely, a lyre.M[artin] L[itchfield] West, "The Babylonian Musical Notation and the Hurrian Melodic Texts", Music and Letters 75, no. 2 (May 1994): 161–79, citation on 166. The hymn was given its first modern performance in 1974, a performance of which The New York Times wrote: "This has revolutionized the whole concept of the origin of western music."
The Hurrian hymn pre-dates several other surviving early works of music (e.g., the Seikilos epitaph and the Delphic Hymns) by a millennium, and the reconstruction of the music has improved over time. The first reconstructions interpreted the musical scale upside down, with the highest tones incorrectly becoming the lowest. In parallel, attempts to map the lyrics onto the music led historians to try to extend the music. Duchesne-Guillemin's reconstruction may be heard at the Urkesh webpage, though this is only one of at least five "rival decipherments of the notation, each yielding entirely different results".M[artin] L[itchfield] West, "The Babylonian Musical Notation and the Hurrian Melodic Texts", Music and Letters 75, no. 2 (May 1994): 161–79, citation on 161. In addition to West and Duchesne-Guillemin ("Les problèmes de la notation hourrite", Revue d'assyriologie et d'archéologie orientale 69, no. 2 (1975): 159–73; "Sur la restitution de la musique hourrite", Revue de Musicologie 66, no. 1 (1980): 5–26; A Hurrian Musical Score from Ugarit: The Discovery of Mesopotamian Music, Sources from the ancient near east, vol. 2, fasc. 2. Malibu, CA: Undena Publications, 1984. ), competitors include Hans Gütterbock, "Musical Notation in Ugarit", Revue d'assyriologie et d'archéologie orientale 64, no. 1 (1970): 45–52; Anne Draffkorn Kilmer, "The Discovery of an Ancient Mesopotamian Theory of Music", Proceedings of the American Philosophical Association 115, no. 2 (April 1971): 131–49; Kilmer, "The Cult Song with Music from Ancient Ugarit: Another Interpretation", Revue d'Assyriologie 68 (1974): 69–82); Kilmer, with Richard L. Crocker and Robert R. Brown, Sounds from Silence: Recent Discoveries in Ancient Near Eastern Music (Berkeley: Bit Enki Publications, 1976; includes LP record, Bit Enki Records BTNK 101, reissued [s.d.] as CD); Kilmer, "Musik, A: philologisch", Reallexikon der Assyriologie und vorderasiatischen Archäologie 8, edited by Dietz Otto Edzard (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1997), 463–82, ; David Wulstan, "The Tuning of the Babylonian Harp", Iraq 30 (1968): 215–28; Wulstan, "The Earliest Musical Notation", Music and Letters 52 (1971): 365–82; and Raoul Gregory Vitale, "La Musique suméro-accadienne: gamme et notation musicale", Ugarit-Forschungen 14 (1982): 241–63. These reconstructions (not decipherments in the correct sense of the word, because the script is well understood and mostly unambiguous) illustrate the history of research and the improvements as well as failures made over time.
The tablet is in the collection of the National Museum of Damascus.
Notation
The arrangement of tablet h.6 places the Hurrian words of the hymn at the top, under which is a double division line. The hymn text is written in a continuous spiral, alternating recto-verso sides of the tablet—a layout not found in Babylonian texts.Marcelle Duchesne-Guillemin, "Sur la restitution de la musique hourrite", Revue de Musicologie 66, no. 1 (1980): 5–26, citation on pp. 10, 15–16. Below this is found the Akkadian musical instructions, consisting of interval names followed by number signs. Differences in transcriptions hinge on interpretation of the meaning of these paired signs, and the relationship to the hymn text. Below the musical instructions there is another dividing line—single this time—underneath which is a colophon in Akkadian reading "This [is] a song [in the] nitkibli [i.e., the nid qabli tuning], a zaluzi … written down by Ammurabi".David Wulstan, "The Earliest Musical Notation", Music and Letters 52 (1971): 365–82. Citation on 372. This name and another scribe's name found on one of the other tablets, Ipsali, are both Semitic. There is no composer named for the complete hymn, but four composers' names are found for five of the fragmentary pieces: Tapšiẖuni, Puẖiya(na), Urẖiya (two hymns: h.8 and h.12), and Ammiya. These are all Hurrian names.M[artin] L[itchfield] West, "The Babylonian Musical Notation and the Hurrian Melodic Texts", Music and Letters 75, no. 2 (May 1994): 161–79, citation on 171.
The Akkadian cuneiform music notation refers to a diatonic scale on a nine-stringed lyre, in a tuning system described on three Akkadian tablets, two from the Late Babylonian and one from the Old Babylonian period (approximately the 18th century BCE).O. R. Gurney, "An Old Babylonian Treatise on the Tuning of the Harp", Iraq 30 (1968): 229–33. Citations on pp. 229 and 233. Marcelle Duchesne-Guillemin, ""Sur la restitution de la musique hourrite", Revue de Musicologie 66, no. 1 (1980): 5–26, citation on pp. 6. Babylonian theory describes intervals of thirds, fourths, fifths, and sixths, but only with specific terms for the various groups of strings that may be spanned by the hand over that distance, within the purely theoretical range of a seven-string lyre (even though the actual instrument described has nine strings). Babylonian theory had no term for the abstract distance of a fifth or a fourth—only for fifths and fourths between specific pairs of strings. As a result, there are fourteen terms in all, describing two pairs spanning six strings, three pairs spanning five, four pairs spanning four, and five different pairs spanning three strings.Marcelle Duchesne-Guillemin, ""Sur la restitution de la musique hourrite", Revue de Musicologie 66, no. 1 (1980): 5–26, citation on pp. 6–8. M[artin] L[itchfield] West, "The Babylonian Musical Notation and the Hurrian Melodic Texts", Music and Letters 75, no. 2 (May 1994): 161–79, citation on 163. The names of these fourteen pairs of strings form the basis of the theoretical system and are arranged by twos in the ancient sources (string-number pairs first, then the regularized Old Babylonian names and translations):M[artin] L[itchfield] West, "The Babylonian Musical Notation and the Hurrian Melodic Texts", Music and Letters 75, no. 2 (May 1994): 161–79, citation on 163.
1–5 nīš tuḫrim (raising of the heel),Samuel Mirelman and Theo J.H. Krispijn, "The Old Babylonian Tuning Text UET VI/3 899" , Iraq 71 (2009): 43–52. formerly read nīš gab(a)rîm (raising of the counterpart) 7–5 šērum (tune/sound/song) 2–6 išartum (straight/in proper condition) 1–6 šalšatum (third) 3–7 embūbum (reed-pipe) 2–7 rebûttum (fourth) 4–1 nīd qablim (casting down of the middle) 1–3 isqum (lot/portion) 5–2 qablītum (middle) 2–4 titur qablītim (bridge of the middle) 6–3 kitmum (covering/closing) 3–5 titur išartim (bridge of the išartum) 7–4 pītum (opening) 4–6 ṣ/zerdum (loosening/gripping)
The name of the first item of each pair is also used as the name of a tuning. These are all fifths (nīš gab(a)rîm, išartum', embūbum') or fourths (nīd qablim, qablītum, kitmum, and pītum), and have been called by one modern scholar the "primary" intervals—the other seven (which are not used as names of tunings) being the "secondary" intervals: thirds and sixths.David Wulstan, "The Tuning of the Babylonian Harp", Iraq 30 (1968): 215–28. Citation on pp. 216 n. 3 and 224.
A transcription of the first two lines of the notation on h.6 reads: qáb-li-te 3 ir-bu-te 1 qáb-li-te 3 ša-aḫ-ri 1 i-šar-te 10 uš-ta-ma-a-ri ti-ti-mi-šar-te 2 zi-ir-te 1 ša-[a]ḫ-ri 2 ša-aš-ša-te 2 ir-bu-te 2.Manfried Dietrich and Oswald Loretz, "Kollationen zum Musiktext aus Ugarit", Ugarit-Forschungen 7 (1975): 521–22. Citation on p. 522.