The Oldest Surviving Song Is 3,400 Years Old

In the 1950s, archaeologists excavating the ruins of the ancient Canaanite city of Ugarit in modern Syria unearthed a collection of clay tablets. While many contained administrative or literary texts, one tablet from approximately 1400 BC held something remarkable: a nearly complete piece of musical notation. This piece, now known as the Hurrian Hymn No. 6, is a religious song dedicated to Nikkal, the goddess of orchards and wife of the moon god. What makes it so significant is that it contains not only lyrics but also detailed instructions for the musician.

The tablet's cuneiform script presented a monumental puzzle for scholars. After decades of work, Assyriologist Anne Draffkorn Kilmer and her colleagues successfully interpreted the notation. They determined it was written in a diatonic scale, similar to the major scale (do-re-mi) we use today, and included instructions for harmonies, specifically thirds, which were long thought to be a much later invention. The notation provides guidance on how to tune a nine-stringed lyre, or a similar instrument called a sammûm, and which notes to play in accompaniment to the sung melody.

This discovery fundamentally shifted our understanding of music history, pushing back the origins of complex, written musical theory by over a thousand years before the ancient Greeks, who were previously credited with its foundations. While we can never know exactly how the hymn sounded in a Bronze Age temple, modern reconstructions based on the tablet's instructions give us a haunting and direct auditory link to a culture that vanished over three millennia ago.