Mesopotamian Music

Mesopotamian music is the music of the ancient river civilizations of Sumer, Akkad, Babylon and Assyria, known not from living tradition but from archaeology: cuneiform tablets preserving a complete theory of scales and tuning, depictions of lyres, harps and lutes, and the Hurrian hymns from Ugarit (c. 1400 BCE), the oldest substantially complete notated songs in the world. Because no unbroken performance practice survives, the modern genre consists of scholarly reconstruction and creative response — musicologists realising the tablets, instrument builders replicating the gold Lyre of Ur, and composers setting Babylonian and Sumerian texts anew.