New Developments in the Social History of Music and Musicians in Ancient IRAQ, SYRIA, and Turkey

Abstract

cerning music and musicians. Along with a common script, a common corpus of terms (with local variants) for instruments, musicians, theory, and performance, were transmitted in various languages and dialects in the third and second millen nia BCE. Apart from later sources from ancient Greece, only ancient Egypt can compare in terms of the extent of textual information in the region.1 In contrast, the musical cultures of ancient Iran are known mostly through iconography and remains of musical instruments (Lawergren 2009). The same is true for Israel/ Palestine, where the sources are essentially material, apart from the Old Testament and a handful of other texts (Braun 2002). The first known written sources concerning music come from southern Iraq.2 These documents are spread over a time-span of approximately three thousand years before the present era. The texts are written in cuneiform script on clay tab lets, primarily in Sumerian and Akkadian languages. Akkadian is a Semitic lan guage, belonging to the same family as Hebrew and Arabic. Sumerian is an isolate (unrelated to any known language), and is probably the first attested (i.e., written) language. Akkadian was also used as a written language in various regional sites outside of Mesopotamia during the second millennium BCE, including the west ern city of Mari in present-day Syria. In the third millennium BCE the cuneiform script had also spread further west in Syria, to the city of Ebla. In Ebla, the script was mostly used to record a local Semitic language. In the second millennium BCE, the cuneiform script spread to Anatolia, and it was used to write the Indo European language now known as Hittite. Most Hittite texts were found in the city