The Oldest (Known) Song Ever
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That's the title of a 9:23 video by a mysterious figure named Ming that was posted a month ago and that I happened upon several days later:
Most of the people to whom I showed this video said they thought that Ming has a robotic, AI-like quality ("an annoying cadence to his voice").
None of the Ancient Near Eastern specialists who viewed the video doubted the reality of the music, but there is no unanimity about how to reconstruct it. There have been reconstructions of a Hurrian (language; people) song floating about for some time.
Specialists tell me that the video is generally correct, but has a number of small errors.
The graphics are good.
Sara de Rose:
Basically, the video has the facts right. Here's a Wikipedia article that describes the discovery and content of the specific Hurrian tablet (h.6 in the National Museum of Damascus).
CBS 10996 is at the Penn Museum….and so is CBS 1766: the star tablet I got to hold. CBS 1766 also has the same sequence of numbers: 4, 1, 5, 2, 6, 3, 7…. Penn has at least one of the Sumerian lyres.
To me, all of this is hauntingly evocative, because much of the material evidence for this music that is more than three millennia old is sitting in the venerable Penn Museum, which is about four hundred steps from my office.
Selected readings
- "Tarim harps; pitch, tones, scales, modes, instruments, and their names" (5/21/22)
- "The Musical Origin of the Seven-Day Week" (5/6/22)
- "Hurrian hymn from Ugarit, Canaan in northern Syria, 1400 BC" (9/9/23) — includes a 4:32 video by hochelaga that was made five years ago and is the forerunner of Ming's expanded video; hochelaga's video also touches briefly on the world's first-known musical instrument, the Paleolithic flute from Hohle Fels in Germany's Swabian Alb. See Victor H. Mair, “Prehistoric European and East Asian Flutes”, contained in [Anderl 2006], pages 209–216. (trans-Eurasian — from Germany to Shandong in Paleolithic times)
- "Prehistoric notation systems in Peru, with Chinese parallels" (4/17/21)
- Sara de Rose, "A Proposed Mesopotamian Origin for the Ancient Musical and Musico-Cosmological Systems of the West and China", Sino-Platonic Papers, 320 (December, 2021)
[Thanks to Phil Jones and Craig Melchert]
Philip Taylor said,
October 25, 2025 @ 11:46 am
I managed the first 20 second of the narration, after which I gave up. Almost as annoying as the woman narrating this afternoon's "Witches of Essex" programme on BBC Radio 4 who insisted on pronouncing "contagion" (/kɒn ˈteɪ dʒən/) as if it were spelled "contagen" (/ˈkɒn tə dʒən/). I could not work out what she meant by "contagen", so asked Google which kindly suggested "contagion".
AntC said,
October 25, 2025 @ 6:17 pm
robotic, AI-like quality ("an annoying cadence to his voice")
(I agree with @PT it's annoying.)
It's supposedly a refined Australian accent. I suspect Ming is trying too hard and/or using some audio filtering. The Youtube site is a mish-mash of 'pop' topics, nothing else on Linguistics or Ancient History. I sampled a few other vids. There seems no more content than you can cull from wikipedia.
To give Ming credit, the vid's more… Description does include links to Dumbrill's recreation 'H6 Hurrian song' performance by Sia "Australian singer". That is a lot easier on the ear.
david said,
October 25, 2025 @ 6:27 pm
The youtube.com site list other earlier versions and has a transcript.
AntC said,
October 25, 2025 @ 7:08 pm
Actually (talking of links), I suggest adding Richard Dumbrill to the post. There's an intriguing list of articles, including "Semitic Music Theory (2600-500 BC)" — wikip's link is broken, but the wayback machine seems to have the complete set of Dumbrill's articles.
So a controversialist?
Victor Mair said,
October 25, 2025 @ 9:13 pm
@AntC
"rejects the hypothesis of the use of dichords in the Musicology of the Ancient Near East"
Yes, that means he is specifically and strongly opposed to the theories of Anne Kilmer, which you can see from the penultimate paragraph from her that I quoted above.