Ancient music - Wikipedia

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Ancient music
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Ancient music is music that developed in

literate cultures, replacing prehistoric music.
Ancient music refers to the various musical
systems that were developed across various
geographical regions such as Mesopotamia,
India, Persia, Egypt, China, Greece and Rome.
Ancient music is designated by the
characterization of the basic notes and scales. It
may have been transmitted through oral or
written systems.

Music eras
Prehistoric
Ancient

before 500 AD

Early

c. 5001760

Common practice

c. 16001900

Modern Contemporary

c. 1900present

Contents
1 Egypt
2 Mesopotamia
2.1 The harps of Ur
2.2 Hurrian music
3 Ancient India
4 Ancient China
5 Ancient Greece
6 Ancient Rome
7 See also
8 References
9 External links

Egypt
Music has been an integral part of Egyptian culture since antiquity. The ancient Egyptians credited
one of the powerful gods Hathor with the invention of music, which Osiris in turn used as part of
his effort to civilize the world. The earliest material and representational evidence of Egyptian
musical instruments dates to the Predynastic period, but the evidence is more securely attested in
tomb paintings from the Old Kingdom (c. 25752134 BC) when harps, end-blown flutes (held
diagonally), and single and double pipes of the clarinet type (with single reeds) were played
(Anderson, Castelo-Branco, and Danielson 2001; Anon. 1999). Percussion instruments, and lutes
were added to orchestras by the Middle Kingdom. Cymbals (Anon. 2003). Egyptian folk music,
including the traditional Sufi dhikr rituals, are the closest contemporary music genre to ancient

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Egyptian music, having preserved many of its features,

rhythms, and instruments (Hickmann 1957,; Anon. 1960,).
Although experiments have been carried out with surviving
Egyptian instruments (on the spacing of holes in flutes and reed
pipes, and attempts to reconstruct the stringing of lyres, harps,
and lutes), only the Tutankhamun trumpets and some percussion
instruments yield any secure idea of how ancient Egyptian
instruments sounded. None of the many theories that have been
formulated have any adequate foundation (Anderson, CasteloBranco, and Danielson 2001).

Mesopotamia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_music

Egyptian lute players. Fresco

from the tomb of Nebamun, a
nobleman in the 18th Dynasty of
Ancient Egypt (c. 1350 BC).

In 1986, Anne Draffkorn Kilmer from the University of

California at Berkeley published her decipherment of a cuneiform tablet from Nippur dated to
about 2000 BCE. She demonstrated that they represent fragmentary instructions for performing
music, that the music was composed in harmonies of thirds, and that it was also written using a
diatonic scale (Kilmer 1986). The notation in that tablet was not as developed as the notation in the
later cuneiform tablet dated to about 1250 BCE (Kilmer 1965). The interpretation of the notation
system is still controversial, but it is clear that the notation indicates the names of strings on a lyre,
and its tuning is described in other tablets (West 1994). These tablets represent the earliest recorded
melodies, though fragmentary, from anywhere in the world (West 1994).

The harps of Ur
In 1929, Leonard Woolley discovered pieces of four harps while excavating in the ruins of the
ancient city of Ur, located in what was Ancient Mesopotamia and is contemporary Iraq. Some of
the fragments are now located at the University of Pennsylvania, in the British Museum in London,
and in Baghdad. They have been dated to 2,750 BCE. Various reconstructions have been attempted,
but none have been totally satisfactory. Depending on various definitions, they could be classed as
lyres rather than harps. The most famous is the bull-headed harp, held in Baghdad. The second
Iraqi War led to the destruction of the bull-head lyre (Anon. 2005).

Hurrian music
Among the Hurrian texts from Ugarit are some of the oldest known instances of written music,
dating from c.1400 BCE and including one substantially complete song. A reconstruction of this
hymn is presented at the Urkesh webpage (http://128.97.6.202/urkeshpublic/music.htm).

Ancient India
Musical instruments, such as the seven-holed flute and various types of stringed instruments have
been recovered from the Indus valley civilization archaeological sites.

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The Samaveda consists of a collection (samhita) of hymns, portions of hymns, and detached verses,
all but 75 taken from the Rigveda, to be sung, using specifically indicated melodies called
Samagana, by Udgatar priests at sacrifices in which the juice of the soma plant, clarified and mixed
with milk and other ingredients, is offered in libation to various deities. In ancient India,
memorization of the sacred Vedas included up to eleven forms of recitation of the same text.
The Ntya Shastra is an ancient Indian treatise on the performing arts, encompassing theatre, dance
and music. It was written at an uncertain date in classical India (between 200 BCE and 200 CE).
The Natya Shastra is based upon the much older Natya Veda which contained 36000 slokas (Ghosh
2002, 2). Unfortunately there are no surviving copies of the Natya Veda. There are scholars who
believe that it may have been written by various authors at different times. The most authoritative
commentary on the Natya Shastra is Abhinavabharati by Abhinava Gupta.
While much of the discussion of music in the Natyashastra focuses on musical instruments, it also
emphasizes several theoretical aspects that remained fundamental to Indian music:
1. Establishment of Shadja as the first, defining note of the scale or grama.
2. Two Principles of Consonance: The first principle states that there exists a fundamental note
in the musical scale which is Avinashi ( ) and Avilopi ( ) that is, the note is
ever-present and unchanging. The second principle, often treated as law, states that there
exists a natural consonance between notes; the best between Shadja and Tar Shadja, the next
best between Shadja and Pancham.
3. The Natyashastra also suggests the notion of musical modes or jatis which are the origin of
the notion of the modern melodic structures known as ragas. Their role in invoking emotions
are emphasized; thus compositions emphasizing the notes gandhara or rishabha are said to be
related to tragedy (karuna rasa) whereas rishabha is to be emphasized for evoking heroism
(vIra rasa).
Jatis are elaborated in greater detail in the text Dattilam, composed around the same time as the
Natyashastra.

Ancient China
Legend has it that the qin, the most revered of all Chinese
musical instruments, has a history of about 5,000 years. This
legend states that the legendary figures of China's pre-history
A famous Tang Dynasty
Fuxi, Shennong and Huang Di, the "Yellow Emperor" were
(618907) qin, the "Jiu Xiao
involved in its creation. Nearly all qin books and tablature
Huan Pei"
collections published prior to the twentieth century state this as
the actual origins of the qin (Yin n.d., 110), although this is
now presently viewed as mythology. It is mentioned in Chinese writings dating back nearly 3,000
years, and examples have been found in tombs from about 2,500 years ago. The exact origins of the
qin is still a very much continuing subject of debate over the past few decades. A qin has recently

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been found in an archeologist site near Beijing, which is believed to be around 1,000 years old

Ancient Greece
Ancient Greek musicians developed their own robust system of
musical notation. The system was not widely used among Greek
musicians, but nonetheless a modest corpus of notated music
remains from Ancient Greece and Rome. The epics of Homer
were originally sung with instrumental accompaniment, but no
notated melodies from Homer are known. Several complete
songs exist in ancient Greek musical notation. Three complete
hymns by Mesomedes of Crete (2nd century CE) exist in
Symposium scene, c. 490 BCE
manuscript. In addition, many fragments of Greek music are
extant, including fragments from tragedy, among them a choral
song by Euripides for his Orestes and an instrumental intermezzo from Sophocles' Ajax.
Some fragments of Greek music, such as the Orestes fragment, clearly call for more than one note
to be sounded at the same time. Greek sources occasionally refer to the technique of playing more
than one note at the same time. In addition, double pipes, such as used by the Greeks and Persians,
and ancient bagpipes, as well as a review of ancient drawings on vases and walls, etc., and ancient
writings (such as in Aristotle, Problems, Book XIX.12) which described musical techniques of the
time, all indicate harmony existed.

Ancient Rome
The music of ancient Rome borrowed heavily from the music of the cultures that were conquered
by the empire, including music of Greece, Egypt, and Persia. Music was incorporated into many
areas of Roman life including the military, entertainment in the Roman theater, religious
ceremonies and practices, and "almost all public/civic occasions."
The philosopher-theorist Boethius was one of the best known musicians of the time, although he
wasn't a musician at all, with his work being regarded as a stepping stone during the Latin Middle
Ages and the Medieval period. His work The Principles of Music (better-known under the title De
institutione musica) divided music into three types: Musica mundana (music of the universe),
musica humana (music of human beings), and musica instrumentalis (instrumental music).
Additionally, his work the Quadrivium was used to understand dissonance and consonance in music
(Anon. 2001).

See also
Prehistoric music
Ravanahatha

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References
Anderson, Robert, Salwa El-Shawan Castelo-Branco, and Virginia Danielson. "Egypt, Arab
Republic of (Jumhuriyat Misr al-Arabiya)". The New Grove Dictionary of Music and
Musicians, second edition, edited by Stanley Sadie and John Tyrrell. London: Macmillan
Publishers, 2001.
Anon. "Rythme, mtre et mesure de la musique instrumentale et vocale des anciens
Egyptiens." Acta Musicologica 32, no. 1 (JanuaryMarch 1960): 1122.
Anon. "Music in Ancient Egypt (http://www.umich.edu/~kelseydb/Exhibits
/MIRE/Introduction/AncientEgypt/AncientEgypt.html)". Music in Roman Egypt: An
Exhibition at the Kelsey Museum of Archaeology 19 March19 December 1999 (accessed 28
June 2014).
Anon. "Music of Ancient Rome". Georgia Regents University Augusta (2001). Retrieved
2013-05-28.
Anon. "Cymbals: UC 33268 (http://www.digitalegypt.ucl.ac.uk/metal/uc33268.html)".
University College London website, 2003 (accessed 28 June 2014).
Anon. "Ancient Iraqi Harp Reproduced by Liverpool Engineers (https://web.archive.org
/web/20100701185936/http://www.liv.ac.uk/news/press_releases/2005/07/lyre_of_ur.htm)".
University of Liverpool website (28 July 2005). Archive from 1 July 2010 (Accessed 21 May
2013).
Ghosh, Manomohan (ed.), Natyasastra: Ascribed to Bharata-Muni [II,]1 Translation.
Chapters 127: A Treatise on Ancient Indian Dramaturgy and Histrionics, completely
translated for the first time from the original Sanskrit with an introduction, various notes, and
index. The Chowkhamba Sanskrit Studies 118 [part 3] (Varanasi: Chowkhambha Sanskrit
Series Office2002). ISBN 81-7080-076-5.
Hickmann, Hans. "Un Zikr Dans le Mastaba de Debhen, Guzah (IVme Dynastie)." Journal
of the International Folk Music Council 9 (1957): 5962.
Kilmer, Anne Draffkorn. "The Strings of Musical Instruments: their Names, Numbers, and
Significance". Studies in Honor of Benno Landsberger = Assyriological Studies 16 (1965),
26168.
Kilmer, Anne Draffkorn, and Miguel Civil. "Old Babylonian Musical Instructions Relating to
Hymnody". Journal of Cuneiform Studies 38 (1986), 9498.
West, M. L. "The Babylonian Musical Notation and the Hurrian Melodic Texts". Music &
Letters 75, no. 2 (May 1994), 16179.
Yin, Wei. n.d. Zhongguo Qinshi Yanyi .

External links
Reconstructed bone flutes, sound sample and playing instructions.
(http://www.ancientinstruments.co.uk)
International Study Group on Music Archaeology (http://www.musicarchaeology.org/)
Musica Romana: Ensemble for ancient music (http://www.musica-romana.de/)

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Ensemble Krylos (http://www.kerylos.fr/index_en.php), a music group led by scholar Annie

Blis and dedicated to the recreation of ancient Greek and Roman music.
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Categories: Ancient music
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