Mesopotamia / Sumeria

The Cradle of Civilisation

Sumer (ki-en-gir “Land of the Lords of Brightness”, Akkadian: Šumeru) was a civilization and historical region in southern Mesopotamia, what is now modern Iraq.
It is the earliest known civilization in the world and is known as the Cradle of Civilization. The Sumerian civilization spanned over 3000 years (6kBC to 2kBC). Sumer was the birthplace of writing, agriculture, the arch and irrigation.

Music

The discovery of numerous musical instruments in royal burial sites and illustrations of musicians in Sumerian art show how music seemed to play an important part of religious and civic life in Sumeria. A lyre is an example of an instrument used in Sumer . Before playing a stringed instrument, the musicians would wash their hands to purify them. Many of the songs were for the Goddess Innana. Dancing girls used clappers to provide rhythm, eventually drums, and wind instruments began to evolve. Music and dancing were a part of daily celebration and temple rites-music was played for marriages and births in the royal families. Music was also used to back up the recitation of poetry. Musicians were trained in schools and formed an important professional class in Mesopotamia.

Instrumentation

Instruments of Ancient Mesopotamia include harps, lyres, lutes, reed pipes and drums. Many of these are shared with neighbouring cultures. Contemporary East African lyres and West African lutes preserve many features of Mesopotamian instruments. (van der Merwe 1989, p.10). The Sumerians also created music.

The vocal tone or timbre was probably similar to the pungently nasal sound of the narrow-bore reed pipes, and most likely shared the contemporary “typically” Asian vocal quality and techniques, including little dynamic changes and more graces, shakes, mordents, glides and microtonal inflections. Singers probably expressed intense and withdrawn emotion, as if listening to themselves, as shown by the practice of cupping a hand to the ear (as is still current in many Arab and folk musics). (ibid, p.11)

Notation

The cultures of ancient Iraq were the first to develop writing, the first known Sumerian writing dating from the fourth millennium BC. Cuneiform sources reveal an orderly organized system of diatonic scales, depending on the tuning of stringed instruments in alternating fifths and fourths. Whether this reflects all types of music we do not know. Besides “chords” (dyads, dichords) of fourths and fifths, thirds (and sixths) played also a considerable role.

Lyres of Ur

Detail of the “Peace” panel of the Standard of Ur showing lyrist, excavated from the same site as the Lyres of Ur.

The Lyres of Ur or Harps of Ur are considered to be the worlds oldest surviving stringed instruments. In 1929, archaeologists discovered pieces of three lyres and one harp in Ur, located in what was Ancient Mesopotamia and is contemporary Iraq.They are over 4,500 years old.

Leonard Woolley led the team that discovered the instruments as part of his excavation of the Royal Cemetery of Ur from 1922 and 1934. The instrument remains were restored and distributed between the museums that took part in the digs.

Nabnitu (“Creature”) is an ancient encyclopedic work of the Old Babylonian period (circa 1800 BCE) that consists of multiple tablets. Its Tablet XXXII (often referred to as U.3011) is a Sumerian-Akkadian text from Ur, and notable as one of the oldest extant documented examples of musical notation. Although on its own, the tablet is somewhat cryptic, analysis of other ancient Babylonian texts reveals that it describes the nine strings of an unidentified instrument and its intervals. The nine strings, numbered symmetrically as 123454321, are presented in two parallel columns, one in Sumerian and the other in Akkadian. Tablet XXXII is now in the collections of the British Museum.

glossary