A European Informational Website
learn more
This article treats the music of Ancient Mesopotamia (see music and Ancient Mesopotamia). Ancient Mesopotamian culture was influenced by the Sumerians, about whom far less is known. The cultures from Ancient Mesopotamia were one of the first to develop writing, the first known Sumerian writing dating from the fourth millenium BC.
Cuneiform sources reveal an orderly organized system of diatonic scales, depending on the tuning of stringed instruments in alternating fifths and fourths. Whether this reflects all types of music we do not know. Besides "chords" (dyads, dichords) of fourths and fifths, thirds (and sixths) played also a considerable role. Of Mesopotamian rhythm, nothing is known.
Instruments of Ancient Mesopotamia include harps, lyres, lutes, reed pipes and drums. Many of these are shared with neighbouring cultures. Contemporary East African lyres and West African lutes preserve many features of Mesopotamian instruments. (van der Merwe 1989, p.10)
The vocal tone or timbre was probably similar to the pungently nasal sound of the narrow-bor reed pipes, and most likely shared the contemporary "typically" Asian vocal quality and techniques, including little dynamic changes and more graces, shakes, mordents, glides and microtonal inflections. Singers probably expressed intense and withdrawn emotion, as if listening to onself, as shown by the practice of cupping a hand to the ear (as is still current in many Arab and folk musics). (ibid, p.11)
Ea, ruler of the deep, was the patron god of music. The sound quality of the drum (Babylonian: balag), made from a bull hide, and pipe, made from reed, were also metaphorically compared to their material's stength, the bull being strong and the reed weak. Instruments were often decorated with images of Ea or bulls, while Ea wrote his name with the sign for a drum, it serving as a personification of his essence. Ramman, god of thunder and winds, was associated with the singing voice and the reed-pipe (hallhallatu). One of the names of Ishtar translates as "the soft reed-pipe". Her partner Tammuz was the "god of the tender voice". (Wellesz 1957, p.230-231)
Temples, which existed in all large cities employed liturgists, most importantly the precentor (Sumerian: gala, Akkadian: kalu) who intoned the cantillation, the chief precentor (Sumerian: galamah, Akkadian: kalamahhu) being the highest position in the city. Many were part time employees and all where unconsecrated, though they were well educated, especially in cantillation (kalutu), formed guilds and were housed in the temple college. They also employed a choir of temple musicians (Sumerian: nar, Akkadian: naru), who where both instrumentalists and vocalists who started providing the response during liturgy and eventually became increasingly associated with private penitential events, including funerals and magic, and dissociated from sacred public service and seen in secular culture. Another sacred musical occupation was called ilukaka (Sumerian, Akkadian: zammeru), which probably meant generic musician or instrumentalist, though the zammeru also sang in services. (ibid, p.231-232)