The Oldest (Known) Song Ever

Language Log 2025-10-25

That's the title of a 9:23 video by a mysterious figure named Ming that was posted a month ago and that I happened upon several days later:

Most of the people to whom I showed this video said they thought that Ming has a robotic, AI-like quality ("an annoying cadence to his voice").

None of the Ancient Near Eastern specialists who viewed the video doubted the reality of the music, but there is no unanimity about how to reconstruct it. There have been reconstructions of a Hurrian (language; people) song floating about for some time.

Specialists tell me that the video is generally correct, but has a number of small errors.

The graphics are good.

Sara de Rose:

Basically, the video has the facts right. Here's a Wikipedia article that describes the discovery and content of the specific Hurrian tablet (h.6 in the National Museum of Damascus).

The other two tablets the video mentions are CBS 10996 and UET VII 74, two tablets that I discuss in my Sino-Platonic paper.

Notice that in the "Notation" section of the Wiki article the first, third, fifth, seventh, etc. string pair numbers listed are 1-5, 2-6, 3-7, 4-1, 5-2, 6-3, 7-4. Notice furthermore that these are the same sequence of numbers listed in Table 2 on pg 20 of my Sino-Platonic paper, which gives the order of the shí’èr lǜ (lit., "12 pitches") as listed in the second paragraph of Chapter Six, “Tonal Pitch” of the Lǚshì chūnqiū (Master Lü's Spring and Autumn Annals). I can show you how these numbers are embedded in the mathematics that generate the 12 notes that the octave is divided into, and also the familiar pattern of frets on the neck of a guitar. (This sequence of numbers is also on my patented music wheel.)

Each of these seven string pairs was given a name in Akkadian, and these names are listed alongside their related number pairs on both CBS 10996 and UET VII 74. The Hurrian tablet uses some of the Akkadian names, showing that the Babylonian musical system was in use as far away as Ugarit circa 1400 BCE.

The controversial thing is that, although we know the relationship between the two notes that make up each pair, we don't know if the notes were played together to make a rudimentary chord (re: Kilmer), or played one after the other (re: Dumbrill). Also, there is no definite way to reconstruct the rhythm of the song. All that is really sure about the music is that it is written using Babylonian musical notation.

CBS 10996 is at the Penn Museum….and so is CBS 1766: the star tablet I got to hold. CBS 1766 also has the same sequence of numbers: 4, 1, 5, 2, 6, 3, 7…. Penn has at least one of the Sumerian lyres.

To me, all of this is hauntingly evocative, because much of the material evidence for this music that is more than three millennia old is sitting in the venerable Penn Museum, which is about four hundred steps from my office.

Selected readings

"Tarim harps; pitch, tones, scales, modes, instruments, and their names" (5/21/22)
"The Musical Origin of the Seven-Day Week" (5/6/22)
"Hurrian hymn from Ugarit, Canaan in northern Syria, 1400 BC" (9/9/23) — includes a 4:32 video by hochelaga that was made five years ago and is the forerunner of Ming's expanded video; hochelaga's video also touches briefly on the world's first-known musical instrument, the Paleolithic flute from Hohle Fels in Germany's Swabian Alb. See Victor H. Mair, “Prehistoric European and East Asian Flutes”, contained in [Anderl 2006], pages 209–216. (trans-Eurasian — from Germany to Shandong in Paleolithic times)
"Prehistoric notation systems in Peru, with Chinese parallels" (4/17/21)
Sara de Rose, "A Proposed Mesopotamian Origin for the Ancient Musical and Musico-Cosmological Systems of the West and China", Sino-Platonic Papers, 320 (December, 2021)

[Thanks to Phil Jones and Craig Melchert]