Hurrian Hymn, the oldest notated melody

Around 1400 BCE, a scribe at Ugarit, a wealthy port city on the Syrian coast, pressed a hymn into a clay tablet in the Hurrian language. The text praises Nikkal, a goddess of orchards married to the moon god. Beneath the words runs a line of signs that scholars read as musical notation, making this tablet, catalogued as H.6, the oldest substantially complete piece of notated music known. It was found during French excavations at Ras Shamra, the site of Ugarit, in 1950.¹³

Music was an old craft by then, with flutes and lyres going back thousands of years, but it had always been passed on by ear. Writing, invented in Mesopotamia around 3200 BCE as cuneiform, gave scribes the tools. Mesopotamian schools had already produced tablets that list the strings of a lyre and the intervals used to tune them, and the Ugarit scribe used that vocabulary: a name for a string or interval, plus a number that probably tells the player how many times to sound it. Ugarit was a crossroads where Hurrian, Akkadian, Hittite and Egyptian traditions met, and it also developed its own alphabet of cuneiform letters.²

Deciphering the tablet has taken decades. Since the 1960s, scholars including Anne Kilmer, Marcelle Duchesne-Guillemin and Richard Dumbrill have proposed realizations for a nine-stringed lyre tuned in what looks like a seven-note scale, and several recordings exist. The reading is uncertain at many points: the tablet is damaged, the Hurrian words are only partly understood, and nobody knows how rhythm was shown, if it was. What the tablet proves beyond doubt is that people in the Late Bronze Age thought about pitch, tuning and written scores.¹³