I don’t know if they have anyone there now working on ancient music, but there wasn’t really anyone when I was there in the 1990s.

Blast from the past: The tale of the Oldest Song Ever

By Charles Leroux
Tribune senior writer
Published April 2, 2007

Talk about your golden oldie!

This past Friday, at the Oriental Institute on the University of Chicago campus, an enthusiastic crowd of about 30 people listened to the North American premiere of the world’s oldest song.

“The Prayer of an Infertile Woman” goes back further than doo-wop or rockabilly and is even older than Peter, Paul and Mary put together. Inscribed in cuneiform symbols on a clay tablet, this tune is, in fact, 1,200 years older than Jesus.

The singer was Dr. Theo J. H. Krispijn, an accomplished vocalist who has appeared on Dutch television. He also is a professor in Assyriology at Leiden University in the Netherlands, and, in that role, brought back — after 3,200 years of silence — the plaintive cry of the infertile woman beseeching the moon goddess, Nikkal, for a solution to her problem.

“She [the goddess] let the married couples have children,” he sang, accompanying himself on a reproduction of an ancient lyre.

“She let them be born to the fathers

“But the begotten will cry out, ‘She has not borne any child’

“Why have not I as a true wife borne children for you?”

The oldest known song is lovely, haunting and sad. Petra Goedegebuure assistant professor of Hittitology at the Oriental Institute, was responsible for bringing her colleague, Krispijn, in for the performance. Of the song, she said, “It’s a lament. It’s sad. When I heard it, I was very touched.”

In 1928, on the Mediterranean coast of what now is northern Syria, a farmer’s plow struck what turned out to be the stone cover of an ancient tomb. Excavation began the following year — unearthing an important late Bronze Age city-state, Ugarit.

A broken clay tablet was dug up, one of many. It carried just the left side of an inscription. Later another tablet, partly burned on its face, was found and someone noticed that its broken edges fit precisely with the earlier find. Together they held the words and music to the 3,200-year-old song.

Ugarit had its own language, but the song was written in Hurrian, a language from further east, Mesopotamia, where Turkey, Syria and Iraq are now. That wasn’t so surprising. Ugarit was an international port. People from all over the Near and Middle East passed through bringing goods to sell — alabaster from Egypt, exotic woods from Africa. The citizens of Ugarit were the Canaanites, depicted in the Bible and in the accounts of early archeologists as hedonists who practiced bloody sacrifices and whose myths described incest between their gods.

A newer generation of scholars, led by Dennis Pardee, professor of Northwest Semitic philology at the Oriental Institute and the department of Near Eastern languages and civilizations at the University of Chicago, read the texts more closely and found the Canaanites’ unsavory reputation to be exaggerated. Pardee, however, did find an account of a god getting drunk and having to be carried home to bed. At the end of the account was a recipe for a hangover cure, the original “hair of the dog.”

It reads: “What is to be put on his forehead: hairs of a dog, and the head of the PQQ [a type of plant] and its shoot he is to drink mixed together with fresh olive oil.”

“Fragments have been found of other songs,” Krispijn said, “but not enough was left to be able to reconstruct. Other scholars began the work, and, about 15 years ago, I started to figure it out.”

Translation was relatively easy. The music was harder. The top of the tablet holds the words. At the bottom were the names of the strings and the combinations of strings (chords) for the accompanying instrument, a lyre. They were followed by numbers indicating, Krispijn decided, that the chord would be played, for instance, two times in a row.

But what would the chords sound like? He found a text from Ur, a city in Mesopotamia, that explained how to tune a lyre, which strings to tighten or loosen and when they were to be tightened together or separately. Tuning two strings together, he thought, meant an octave. That led to knowledge of the scale used and led also to a debate.

“At first there were scholars who didn’t think that there could have been polyphonic music so early,” he said, “but my work is pretty much accepted now.”

So he had the accompaniment, but what about the vocal?

“Well,” he said, “we don’t absolutely know. I have chosen notes to fit the accompaniment and the syllables of the text.”

Those who heard it agreed that Krispijn had chosen well.

This looks really interesting.

Ancient musicology is apparently a pretty active field of inquiry. I know David Wright at Brandeis is interested in ancient music, and I think BYU has a guy with an interest in that direction.

BTW, this post is at least in part in honor of the surfeit of assyriologists the Bloggernacle has managed to attract.