Can We Still Hear Music From Before King David?
Can We Still Hear Music From Before King David?
Last time we took a rabit hole 🕳 we discovered David probably wasn't carrying around a giant concert harp.
That got me thinking... Thinking A LOT... If David inherited an ancient musical tradition...
How old is that tradition?
I assumed and expected a few hundred years or maybe a thousand. Guess what?... I wasn't even close. The answer takes us to a city most people have never heard of.
Welcome to Ugarit
Let's climb into our online time machine again. We need to change oue lens to get a better POV. This time we're traveling to the northern coast of modern-day Syria.
Around 1400 BC. A bustling port city called Ugarit sits on the Mediterranean. So looking back at 1400 BC, the cosmopolitan port of Ugarit entered its golden age as a flourishing city and a major trade center connecting Egypt with Mesopotamia and Asia Minor. Five harbors facilitated international commerce in goods like olive oil, metals, and Tyrian purple cloth, while its skyline was dominated by a large royal palace and temples dedicated to Baal and his father Dagan.
So ships arrive here carrying copper from Cyprus.Merchants unload cedar from Lebanon. Scribes scratch strange wedge-shaped symbols into clay as a type of writing.Children play in dusty streets among livestock. Kings negotiate treaties. Priests prepare sacrifices. Musicians tune their instruments.
Sound familiar?... If not... Well... It should. You will see that this is the same world the Israelites would later enter. The world at the time... Not the same people. Not the same religion but they are the same cultural neighborhood. That's one reason archaeologists and people like myself get excited about Ugarit. It helps us understand the world the Bible assumes its readers already knew.
A Clay Tablet That Shouldn't Exist
In the 1950s, archaeologists uncovered a collection of clay tablets unlike anything they'd seen before anywhere... Most were legal documents. Letters. Myths. Boring dministrative records and receipts. Then they found something REALLY extraordinary.
A song. Not just lyrics.Music.
The tablet is now known as Hurrian Hymn No. 6.
It's over 3,400 years old was found in Ugarit (modern-day Syria), this ancient artifact was dedicated to the goddess Nikkal...
Stop and think about that. That's older than the kingdoms of Israel and Judah. Older than David and older than Solomon. Older than the Temple. Someone sat down over three millennia ago and wrote music that, in a sense, we can still hear today. That blows my mind 😲😲😲
Wait...
How do you write music on clay you ask.... Excellent question if you asked it. You see... the top of the tablet contains the lyrics. They're written in the Hurrian language. The lower portion contains musical instructions written using Akkadian cuneiform. It's not sheet music like we're used to I mean there are no treble clefs. No quarter notes. No key signatures.
Instead, the tablet appears to describe intervals and tuning instructions for a stringed instrument something most likely a lyre. Scholars still debate exactly how to interpret it and that's important.
We don't have certainty. We simply have evidence. Different researchers reconstruct the melody in slightly different ways. That's why if you search online, you'll hear several versions. They're all educated attempts to bring an ancient song back to life.
Did You Know?
Music may have been written down long before this.
The Hurrian Hymn is the oldest piece of music we can reconstruct with reasonable confidence but people were almost certainly making music for tens of thousands of years before anyone thought to write it down. Music is actually older than writing. Older than cities and IMO probably older than agriculture.
The hymn appears to be dedicated to the goddess Nikkal, a deity associated with orchards and fertility. That reminds us of something important here... Ancient music wasn't just entertainment.
It was worship.
Prayer.
Memory.
Hope.
No two performances sound exactly alike
Because parts of the tablet are damaged, every modern performance includes a little interpretation. That's not a weakness my lovlies, that's archaeology. Sometimes the evidence gives us ninety percent and the last ten percent remains an honest mystery.
Why This Matters
At first glance, this has nothing to do with the Bible. Or does it? Imagine young David sitting on a hillside with his kinnôr. He's composing songs to God. He's certainly creating something new to him... However he isn't inventing music itself. He's simply joining one of humanity's oldest conversations. Long before Israel sang the Psalms...
People sang prayers.
Long before choirs filled cathedrals...
Families gathered around simple stringed instruments.
Long before we streamed music through our phones...
Someone pressed musical instructions into wet clay and hoped another musician would understand them.
Human beings have always sung. Sometimes to celebrate. Sometimes to grieve. Sometimes because words alone weren't enough. That's why music keeps showing up in the Bible I think... Music reaches places ordinary speech never quite can.
One More Thought
One of the things I love most about archaeology is that it constantly reminds me how much we have in common with people who lived thousands of years ago.
They fell in love.
Buried loved ones.
Raised children.
Argued with neighbors.
Wondered about God.
And they wrote songs.
The technology has changed.
The instruments have changed.
The languages have changed.
Modern eyes tell us that the human heart hasn't changed nearly as much as we imagined. History has a funny way of doing that. The farther back we go... The more familiar people begin to feel.
If You Want to Keep Digging
The Hurrian Hymns (overview)
https://www.britannica.com/art/Hurrian-songs
The British Museum – Mesopotamia
https://www.britishmuseum.org/
The Metropolitan Museum of Art – Ancient Near East
https://www.metmuseum.org/toah/
Penn Museum – Mesopotamia
https://www.penn.museum/
World History Encyclopedia – Ugarit
https://www.worldhistory.org/Ugarit/
Listen to several scholarly reconstructions
Search YouTube for:
Listen to more than one.
The differences are part of the story.
Until Next Time...
If the Hurrian Hymn is the oldest melody we can still hear...
It raises another question.
Why did the ancient Greeks believe music could shape a person's character?
They didn't think music was just something you listened to.
They thought it could change who you became.
And surprisingly...
Modern neuroscience has more to say about that than you might expect.
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