ICOBASE

Object identity: IC200710:11

Museum identity: The Schoyen Collection: MS 2951

Location: The Schoyen Collection

Period: Neo Sumerian clay tablet, Babylonia, 1900-1700 BC, 1 tablet, 6,5×4,4×2,0 cm, single column, 13 lines in cuneiform script.

Partial Translation: Hebe-Eridu the son of Adad-Lamasi sat with Il-Siri in order to learn music. At that time, in order to study singing, the tiglidu-instrument, the asila-instrument, the tigi-instrument,and the adab-instrument seven times, Adad-Lamasi paid Il-Siri 5 shekels of silver. Ili-Ippalsani, the schoolmaster

IC200710:11

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Object identity: IC200710:12

Museum identity: The Schoyen collection: MS 2340

Sumerian clay tablet, about 2500 BC, upper half of a huge tablet with fragment of lower part, 20×30x5 cm + 9×18x5 cm, originally ca. 40×30x5 cm, 16+9 and 7+7 columns, 437+ ca. 100 lines remaining in cuneiform script, circular depressions introducing each new entry. This is a lexical list with 9 types of musical strings, 23 types of musical instruments and music, as well as unknown instruments.

Similar, smaller tablets are known from Fara or Tell Abu Salabikh. 3 compilations all from 26th c. BC have music instruments. The present tablet is almost a duplicate of a relatively well-known lexical list, discussed by Miguel Civil in Cagni, Ebla 1975-1985, pp. 133 ff. The obverse is an abbreviated recension with minor changes in the sequence of the entries. The reverse is the continuation of the unfinished Fara recension.

The earliest known record of music and musical instruments in history. The name of one of the stringed instruments is a Semitic word, ki-na-ru, the later kinnaru known from the Mari letters and Ras Shamra texts and the still later Biblical Hebrew kinnor. The system of phonetic notation in Sumer and Babylonia is based on a music terminology that gives individual names to 9 musical strings or notes, and to 14 basic terms describing intervals of the 4th and 5th.

Location: The Schoyen collection

Bibliography: Civil, M.,  Cagni, Ebla 1975-1985, pp. 133 ff.

IC200710:12

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Object identity: IC200710:13

Museum identity: Penn Museum: CBS 1766

Early in June 2007, Caroline Waerzeggers and Ronny Siebes from the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam proposed an alternative interpretation to a thesis in a paper published by Wayne Horowitz, of the Hebrew University, New York, in the Journal of the Ancient Near Eastern Society. The text under discussion is at present in the collection of the University Museum, Philadelphia under number CBS 1766. It was published by Hilprecht about one hundred years ago in his Explorations in Bible Lands During the 19th Century. This volume included a photograph of the inscribed side with the label: ‘Astronomical Tablet from the Temple Library’. In Horowitz’s words, the designation of the text was untested and has been for the most part forgotten. No edition or even copy of the tablet was ever published, and the only printed study of the text was that of A. Jeremias where a reprint of the photograph is accompanied by a proposal that the text provides an astrological scheme to relate the seven ancient planets to the seven days of the week.  Borger describes the tablet as: ‘Astronomisch’, following Hilprecht, and lists it in under the category ‘Astronomie, Sternlisten, Kalenderwissenschaft’. C.B.F. Walker included it in his ‘Bibliography of Babylonian Astronomy and Astrology’.

However, the terms inscribed in the concentric circles are names of seven out of nine strings well know from older texts. The numbers in the columns give a pattern specific to a tuning system, consisting in the alternation of fifths and fourths which was later known to Greek an following cultures. This is probably the earliest evidence of heptatonism in the history of the theory of music and dates from the first millennium.

Location: University Museum, Philadelphia.

Bibliography: N.A.B.U., (2007), no.2 (juin), pp. 43-45; JANES, Vol. 30, 2006; Jeremias, A., Handbuch der altorientalischen Geisteskultur, 2nd ed., (Berlin and Liepzig, 1929), pp.197-199; 4CBF Walker, in: GRAZER MORGENLÄNDISCHE STUDIEN  Die Rolle der Astronomie in den Kulturen  Mesopotamiens. Beiträge zum morgenländischer Symposion (23-27 September 1991), herausgegeben von Hannes D. Galter. pp. 407-445; Dumbrill, R.J., The earliest evidence of heptatonism in a late Old Babylonian text: CBS 1766, ARANE 2010, forthcoming.

IC200710:13

Object identity: IC200710:14

Museum identity: The Schoyen collection: MS 5105

Possibly some musical notation of 2 ascending consecutive heptatonic scales to be played on a 4 stringed lute tuned in ascending fifths: C – G – D – A, using frets. it is a school text.

Old Babylonian on clay, Babylonia, 2000-1700 BC, 1 lenticular tablet, diam. 9,0×3,2 cm, 2 double columns, each of 7 ruled lines with numbers in Old Babylonian cuneiform tablature notation, with headings, “intonation” and “incantation”, respectively.

Context: The only other complete music text is a later Hurrian hymn written in the mode of nidqibli, which is the enneatonic descending scale of E.

Commentary: The oldest musical notation known so far. Lutes are not preserved from the Old Babylonian period. The earliest known description of a lute dates from the middle of the 10th c., of a 9th c. instrument, Oxford, Bodleian library MS Marsh 521. The present notation system gives contemporary information on the Old Babylonian 4 stringed lute. It further attests that frets were used, and that their values, tonal and semitonal, were purposely calculated. Most significantly the discovery of this text attests of a music syllabus in educational institutions about 4000 years ago.

Location: The Schoyen collection

Bibliography: Dumbrill, R.J., (2005) The Archaeomusicology of the Ancient Near East, pp.96-110

IC200710:14

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Object identity: IC200710:15

Museum identity: British museum: BM UET VII 74

This tablet dates from the old Babylonian period, about 1800 BC. It was unearthed by Sir Leonard Woolley at Ur and was published about forty years later in 1968 by Professor Gurney.

This is a photograph of a cast of the tablet at the British Museum, taken by Richard Dumbrill. The original had been returned to the Iraqi Museum in Baghdad in the seventies.

Bibliography: Gurney, O.R., An Old Babylonian Treatise on the Tuning of the Harp, IRAQ XXX, (1968), 229-233; Vitale, R., La musique suméro-accadienne, gamme et notation musicale, UGARIT-FORSCHUNGEN 9, 1982), 241-265; Gurney, O.R., Babylonian Music Again, IRAQ LVI, (1994), 101-106;  Dumbrill, R.J., (2005) The Archaeomusicology of the Ancient Near East, pp.47-69.

IC200710:15

Object identity: IC200710:9

Museum identity: Penn museum: CBS 10996

This tablet was published by Professor Kilmer in 1960. It was found at the site of Nippur and was originally thought to be from the Kassite Period, about 1500 BC. All now agree that it is neo-Babylonian, early first millennium BC, but there again it is possible that this was a copy of a far older text on the basis that the terminology is known from another, UET VII 74, dated ca. 1800 BC.

Bibliography: Kilmer, A., Two New Lists for Mathematical Operations, Orientalia 29, (1960), 273-308 and Tab. LXXXIII; Dumbrill, R.J., (2005) The Archaeomusicology of the Ancient Near East, pp.37-45.

The transliteration and translation from lines 11 to 24 is:

IC200710:9