The oldest song in the world

Witness History

BBC

History, Personal Journals, Society & Culture

4.4 • 1.6K Ratings

🗓️ 4 January 2021

⏱️ 12 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

A 3,500 year old song was found on a clay tablet by archaeologists in Syria in the 1950s. Often called the Hurrian Hymn, it had been unearthed amid the ruins of an ancient palace which belonged to the ancient Hurrian civilization. It is the oldest complete song ever found. The tablet was inscribed in the Hurrian language but using cuneiform script. Academics have spent decades debating how to interpret the song's ancient musical notation. Alex Last spoke to Richard Dumbrill, a leading archaeomusicologist, who has spent decades studying the tablet and has produced his own interpretation of the song. Photo: The Hurrian song written in cuneiform on the clay tablet H6 (Richard Dumbrill)

Transcript

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0:00.0	Just before this BBC podcast gets underway, here's something you may not know.
0:04.7	My name's Linda Davies and I Commission Podcasts for BBC Sounds.
0:08.5	As you'd expect, at the BBC we make podcasts of the very highest quality featuring the most knowledgeable experts and genuinely engaging voices.
0:18.0	What you may not know is that the BBC makes podcasts about all kinds of things like pop stars,
0:24.6	poltergeist, cricket, and conspiracy theories and that's just a few examples.
0:29.7	If you'd like to discover something a little bit unexpected, find your next podcast over at BBC Sounds. Hello and welcome to the Witness History Podcast from the BBC World Service with me Alex Last.
0:47.0	And today a musical tale from Antiquity as we go back 3 and a half thousand years
0:53.4	to tell the story of the with the discovery of some clay tablets
1:11.9	amid the ancient ruins of a palace once home to a long lost
1:15.9	civilization the Hurrians who lived in Syria three and a half thousand years ago.
1:25.0	These tablets were discovered in the 50s and a bit before
1:29.5	by a team of French archaeologists
1:32.1	at the site of Rash Jamra in northwest Syria in the ancient
1:38.5	palace of Ugarit which had been destroyed by the ancient Egyptians around 1400 BC.
1:46.0	Richard Dumbrell is an archaio musicologist, a specialist in the ancient music of Syria and Iraq.
1:53.0	There were about 29 tablets,
1:56.0	but they could only reconstruct one of them completely from three bits.
2:01.0	And what was special about this tablet, known as H6, was that it
2:06.1	contained both the lyrics and the music for a song and dated to around 1400 BC.
2:13.4	Never before had a complete song of such antiquity been found.
2:18.0	Many years later Richard went to Damascus to see the tablet for himself.
2:23.0	It's about 20 centimeters wide and about 7 to 10 centimeters high.
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