The Fragmentary Music Text from Nippur

Crocker, Richard L.; Kilmer, Anne Draffkorn

doi:10.2307/4200217

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“…I discussed the first five texts, as well as one other (Kilmer 1984). In order to keep the texts straight in the order of their discovery, I numbered them as follows (note that Bayer labels them differently): -The Neo-Babylonian (NB) mathematical text, CBS 10996 [Bayer's text no.…”

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Mesopotamian Music Theory Since 1977

Kilmer¹

2014

Music in Antiquity

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“…These terms may refer, if not to scales, to hymn "types" (Kilmer 1984(Kilmer , 1997. Text 6: This NA text, probably from Sippar, presents instructions for the musical performance of gesture prayers (Akkadian ikribū) "for the king"; the prayers are listed by their opening lines and are preceded by the string/note on which to start (or end) the piece.…”

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Mesopotamian Music Theory Since 1977

Kilmer¹

2014

Music in Antiquity

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The Old Babylonian tuning text UET VI/3 899

Mirelman

Krispijn

2009

Iraq

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The text discussed here is one of only two identified fragments of Mesopotamian instructions for tuning a stringed instrument. Apart from its rarity, this text is important in several other respects. It confirms the reconstruction of the tuning cycle suggested by the other tuning fragment (UET VII 74), it appears to belong to a duplicate manuscript of the tuning cycle, it supports the argument for the presence of the verb nê'um (as opposed to enûm) in Akkadian terminology for tuning, and it offers a revised reading of the music-theoretical term nīš GABA.RI as nīš tuḫri(m).

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Babylonian Music Again

Gurney¹

1994

Iraq

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In Iraq 30 (1968) I published a fragmentary text from Ur, then numbered 7/80, containing part of a treatise on the tuning of the sammû instrument, and with the collaboration of the musicologist David Wulstan, who himself contributed a companion article, I added an interpretation, with a table showing that the text described seven different tunings, with instructions in two chapters for the conversion of each one to the next, first by lowering, then by raising the pitch of one string by a semitone. The copy of the text was subsequently published again as UET VII 74 and the number 7/80 was abandoned when the tablet was sent to Baghdad and renumbered in the Iraq Museum. This text, usually known as “the tuning text” — a better name would be “retuning text” — provided the decisive clue to the understanding of the Babylonian musical system and its terminology, which have since been expounded by several musicologists and compared with the Greek system of “octave species”. So well established did the theory become that it was applied without question by several scholars when a few years later a tablet apparently containing a musical notation using the same terminology was recognized among the tablets from Ras Shamra-Ugarit. Little notice was taken in 1982 when Raoul Vitale wrote an article calling in question the basic assumption of the theory that the tuning system and the scales were upward rather than downward. Only recently has M. L. West proposed in this article “The Babylonian Musical Notation and the Human Melodic Texts” (Music and Letters 75/4 [1993], 161–79) that Vitale's theory should be seriously considered.

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The Fragmentary Music Text from Nippur

Cited by 5 publications

References 0 publications

Mesopotamian Music Theory Since 1977

Mesopotamian Music Theory Since 1977

The Old Babylonian tuning text UET VI/3 899

Babylonian Music Again

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