Tuning Procedures in Ancient Iraq

he discovery, from the 1960s until the present, of a small corpus of about twenty texts concerning strings, tuning, and performance from ancient Iraq (loosely equivalent to “Mesopotamia”) and Syria has transformed our view of the earliest stages of music history. Not only is this corpus by far the earliest recorded expression of what might be called “music theory, ” but these texts also belong to a highly sophisticated musical culture that had been forgotten for approximately two millenia, before the decipherment of cuneiform writing in the nineteenth century. This corpus represents a truly forgotten first chapter of music history. It also occupies a unique phase of music history due to the fact that, according our available evidence, there are no predecessors and no obvious successors.1 The Mesopotamian texts concerning the technicalities of music are written in cuneiform script, in the Akkadian language, and on clay tablets. They were excavated from sites in modern Iraq (the north was known as Assyria and the south Babylonia) and Syria. None of these texts are precisely dated; however, they can be very approximately dated by period from the analysis of script, language, and orthography. The earliest of these texts, the tuning text (so named because it is the only clear example of instructions for tuning), dates to the Old Babylonian period, conventionally ca. 2000-1500 BCE. Thus, they precede by approximately one millennium anything 1 Despite the fact that a connection with ancient Greek music theory has been argued, the connections are in my opinion indirect. This is not to say that there is no connection between Mesopotamia and Greece, but that the similarities were probably general characteristics of Mediterranean music cultures in Antiquity. The only major evidence of these cultures that has survived comes from Mesopotamia and Greece. For an investigation into this matter, including earlier bibliography, see Franklin 2002