How it began
The Hurrian songs are a collection of music written in cuneiform on clay tablets from the ancient city of Ugarit, on a headland in northern Syria. They date to approximately 1400 BCE and were found in a layer of the fourteenth century BCE in the Royal Palace. About 36 hymns survive as fragments. Only one, known as h.6 or the Hurrian Hymn to Nikkal, survives in substantially complete form.
How it works
The tablet carries the words of a hymn in the Hurrian language together with instructions for performing it, written in cuneiform signs. A study in the journal Early Music describes it as one of the oldest known examples of instructional musical notation in cuneiform. The notation is ambiguous, so scholars have produced several different reconstructions of the melody, including one by Richard Dumbrill that has been performed on a replica lyre.
What lasted
The Hymn to Nikkal is regarded as the oldest surviving substantially complete work of notated music in the world, about 3,400 years old. It shows that people on the Syrian coast in the Late Bronze Age had a way to write down how a piece of music should be played, and not only its words.
Where it stands today
The tablets were excavated in the 1950s and their interpretation is still debated in academic journals. Modern musicians record competing versions of the hymn, and it is widely presented to the public as the oldest known song, about 3,400 years after it was pressed into clay at Ugarit.
